How to stop operating theatres from wasting two hours each day

So what can we do?

Three reasons are sighted in the NHSI report for the inefficient use of theatre time:

The team at one of the trusts we are working with have started to look at how they can fix the third problem: safely fit more operations into their theatres without simply ‘overbooking’ operating lists. We’ve been helping them to do this using a tool that we developed called Space Finder.

Space Finder solves the problem by predicting how long operations take to perform. It’s tailored to the doctor, patient, and the operation – for example, it spotted that operations on the right knee tend to be quicker than those on the left knee due to the positioning of the patient relative to the right-handed doctor.

It is very accurate. It’s so accurate that it can spot poor theatre scheduling days in advance so that other patients can safely be booked in for surgery. In its first month of use, it has already managed to help book several additional cases per week, allowing people to have their surgery sooner than expected with no additional cost to the hospital – a great result for the early stages of the work.

This has been made possible by harnessing years of data from previous surgery. Using machine learning (a type of artificial intelligence), Space Finder learns from this data and predicts operating times. The more operations that take place, the more Space Finder learns and the better it predicts.

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