ArticleThe British journal of surgery2018
Operating list composition and surgical performance.
Article in The British journal of surgery, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Causal evidence of task-switching costs in organ transplantation.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Allocating operating room time in orthopaedic trauma: a survey in medical ethics.Journal of public health (Berlin, Germany) · 2026Article
- Article
- Article
- Establishing the influence of case complexity on the order of cataract lists: a cross-sectional survey.BMJ open ophthalmology · 2021Article
- Frontal theta brain activity varies as a function of surgical experience and task error.BMJ surgery, interventions, & health technologies · 2020Article
- Contributory factors in surgical incidents as delineated by a confidential reporting system.Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundRecent reviews suggest that the way in which surgeons prepare for a procedure (warm up) can affect performance. Operating lists present a natural experiment to explore this phenomenon. The aim was to use a routinely collected large data set on surgical procedures to understand the relationship between case list order and operative performance.
methodTheatre lists involving the 35 procedures performed most frequently by senior surgeons across 38 private hospitals in the UK over 26 months were examined. A linear mixed-effects model and matched analysis were used to estimate the impact of list order and the cost of switching between procedures on a list while controlling for key prognosticators. The influence of procedure method (open versus minimally invasive) and complexity was also explored.
resultsThe linear mixed-effects model included 255 757 procedures, and the matched analysis 48 632 pairs of procedures. Repeating the same procedure in a list resulted in an overall time saving of 0·98 per cent for each increase in list position. Switching between procedures increased the duration by an average of 6·48 per cent. The overall reduction in operating time from completing the second procedure straight after the first was 6·18 per cent. This pattern of results was consistent across procedure method and complexity.
conclusionThere is a robust relationship between operating list composition and surgical performance (indexed by duration of operation). An evidence-based approach to structuring a theatre list could reduce the total operating time.
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