Scheduled surgery cases running past 7 p.m. impact our urgent and add-on cases – plus, delays cause patient dissatisfaction with long wait times and changing discharge plan. To address this issue, we worked with Surgical Governance to begin a more formal process to assess and reschedule non-urgent cases that will run more than 90 minutes past the end of the block.
This process is intended to support excellent patient care by ensuring that our evening and overnight call teams can respond quickly to urgent and emergent cases. Benefits for our scheduled patients include reducing waiting time in Prep; plus it will help patients discharge home following scheduled surgery, rather than have an unplanned overnight stay in the hospital.
Please see the attached document that outlines how we will be testing. This process is intended to support using our resources to ensure access for urgent/emergent cases after hours.
If your patient has unusual specific factors, please add time to your schedule request. For instance, if you expect lots of adhesions or complicated anatomy, ask your scheduler to add an appropriate amount of time to the routine booking (e.g. + one hour). About 12% of our cases run more than 30 minutes past scheduled operative time, but relatively few result in running more than 90 minutes behind.
We appreciate your participation; if you have questions or comments, please contact Angie Anderson.