Introduction Due to rising health costs, hospitals are making efforts to assess and improve management efficiency. However, at present, Japanese hospitals rely on individual assessment methods. Due to the lack of a common method of assessment based on standardized data available from all hospitals meaningful comparisons cannot be conducted. The objectives of this study were to develop a method ...

Surgical education has always been challenging and is being made more difficult with the changes in the surgical environment. In the past decade, the number of patients available for educational purposes has decreased because of the development of technology that has significantly reduced their time of stay in the hospital and has also moved many surgical procedures to ambulatory services. Tech...

A scientific four-step approach to evaluating efficiency in the operating room (OR) is described. These steps include identification of sequential work activities (SWAs) that are critical to the timely progression of surgical cases through the OR, identification of a time standard for completion of SWAs, direct observations of the amount of time required for completion of SWAs, and analysis of ...