Fauzia Minai and Nosheela Rafique
Scientific Tracks Abstracts: Pediatr Therapeut
Same Day Surgical cases which require full operating suite facilities need organizational support for admission and discharge on same day in order to ensure minimum waiting time and maximum postoperative in hospital care time to enable safe discharge home the same day. For organizational effi ciency an important indicator of performance is fi rst case start time tardiness. Frequent delays have been observed on several lists with a mixed category of patients which could not start on time due to late arrival of the fi rst day case and subsequent overrunning of scheduled list time. It also caused inconveniently delayed discharge time for the last patient. In order to identify the areas of patient care pathway where signifi cant delay is occurring we decided to audit the time between registration of fi rst scheduled patient and this patient�s arrival in the designated OR, by recording the time of registration, time of arrival in waiting room of OR suite and time of arrival in the designated OR. We included 112 fi rst on list cases during a two month period. Out of these 43 were paediatric patients between 1.5 to 15 years of age. We found that the average time between registration and arrival in waiting room of OR suite was 45 mins, average time from waiting room to wheeling into designated OR was 35.60 minutes and total average time from registration to OR was 80.80 minutes (Table 1). For paediatric patients registration to OR time was 75.62 minutes (Table 2). With prolonged waiting times paediatric patients fasting, apprehension and parents anxiety are major management issues. Our data show that we need to review our patient care processes in the surgical day case admission and preparation unit, as well as in the OR, to reduce fi rst on list day case patients time from registration to OR to 25- 45 minutes, to meet moderate to high performance indicators.
Dr Fauzia Minai is an Assistant Professor of Anaesthesia at the Aga Khan University Karachi. She is Coordinator of Surgical Day Care services since 2006 and has a special interest in Quality improvement in patient care and organisational processes. She has performed several audits which have been published in indexed journals.
