Surgical staff is considered to have several ergonomic risk factors, but their physical workload and musculoskeletal health have seldom been evaluated. Clinical examinations of neck and upper extremities were performed in 99 theatre nurses and 93 assisting nurses, all females. Their physical workload was assessed by questionnaire, and by technical measurements of postures, movements and muscula...

UNLABELLED Economic considerations suggest that it is desirable to keep operating rooms fully used when staffed, but the optimum utilization of an operating room (OR) is not known. We created a simulation of an OR to define optimum utilization. We set operational goals of having cases start within 15 min of the scheduled time and of having the cases end no more than 15 min past the scheduled en...

THE JOURNAL OF BONE AND JOINT SURGERY S. P. F. Hughes, MS, FRCS, FRCS Ed(Orth), Head of the Division of Surgery, Anaesthetics and Intensive Care Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Imperial College School of Medicine, Charing Cross Hospital, Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8RF, UK. F. M. Anderson, FRCPath, Consultant Microbiologist Department of Microbiology, St Helier Hospital, Wrythe Lane, Carsh...

Historically anaesthetists employed only their senses to monitor patients during the conduct of anaesthesia. Recent developments have made the continuous watching of patient, devices, and every instrumental display virtually impossible. Hearing is an essential communication channel between instrument and user. The human auditory system responds most to the timing of sound stimuli so that a tran...

The skills of the anaesthetist are requested more frequently in different locations of the hospital outside the operating room. With rapid developments in medicine, there has been a proliferation in the number of procedures performed by nonsurgical physicians. Procedures may be uncomfortable or have severe complications. The anaesthetist's role is important to the safety and comfort of the pati...

Objectives The operating room is a place of surgical intervention with its accompanying bodily and cognitive strain on the performers. Stress in the operating room may lead to the onset of central serous chorioretinopathy as reported hereby in a retina surgeon and is labeled as operating room central serous chorioretinopathy. Methods The same operator performed the optical coherence tomograph...

Purpose – This paper aims to identify key factors that impact operating room (OR) utilization and evaluate different scenarios on OR performance. Design/methodology/approach – Five months of data were collected. stepwise regression and best subset models were used to select factors and generate regression model for OR utilization. We further used simulation to test the influence of case duratio...

To the Editor:—In the August 2005 issue of ANESTHESIOLOGY, Sandberg et al. describe an Operating Room of the Future (ORF) that includes extensive physical and workflow redesigns for “optimal support of advanced minimally invasive surgery.” The ORF enhancements incorporate increased capital costs for advanced equipment and increased personnel costs as compared with their standard operating room....