Surgeons at one London hospital are performing an entire week’s operations in a single day as part of a ground-breaking initiative that could help tackle the record waiting lists in the NHS.
Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust has already slashed its own elective backlog in certain specialities by running monthly HIT (High Intensity Theatre) lists at weekends.
Under the innovative model, two operating theatres run side by side and as soon as one procedure is finished the next patient is already under anaesthetic and ready to be wheeled in.
Nurses are on standby to sterilise the operating theatre and instead of taking 40 minutes between cases it takes less than two, the only delay is the 30 second it takes for the anti-bacterial cleaning fluid to work.
Kariem El-Boghdadly, the consultant anaesthetist who designed the programme with his colleague Imran Ahmad, compares it to a Formula One pit stop. “They’ve got one person doing the rear right wheel, one person doing the front left wheel. It’s the same thing. The operating theatre is effectively like that.”
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Source: The Times, 10 December 2023
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