Are the operation theatres being optimally utilized? – A prospective observational study in a tertiary care public sector hospital

The study aimed to analyse the utilization of the operation theatres at a tertiary care teaching hospital. An observational study with time monitoring of various processes was carried out from January to December 2016 in the OT complex of a public sector tertiary care hospital. OT complex comprised of 12 operating rooms and all the elective OTs (11) were included in the study except the emergency OT. One OT for a full day per week was observed. Selection of operation theatre and weekday for data collection was done using simple random sampling without replacement using chit system. OTs were observed for 26 days spread over a period of 6 months with resource hours of 15,000 min (250 h). A total of 129 (69.34%) surgeries out of 186 scheduled surgeries were conducted with an average of 4.61 surgeries per day and an observed cancellation rate of 30.66%. Overall raw utilization of OT was observed to be 99.29%, while overall adjusted utilization was 128.53% with an idle time of 0.81% only. Total time spent on “anaesthesia preparation” was 1624 min (8.42%), “surgical preparation time” was 1930 min (10.01%), “actual surgery time” was 9554 min (49.56%), “room set-up and room clean-up time” was 4441 min (23.04%), “surgery finish and anaesthesia finish time” was 574 min (2.98%) and “turn over time” was 1000 min (5.19%). The operation theatres are being optimally utilized, however, an effort should be made to make the ancillary processes (room set up and clean up) more efficient.