Turnover time (TT) is the time it takes to prepare an operating room (OR) between consecutive surgeries. Short TT improves OR efficiency, while maintaining patient and staff safety and satisfaction. Yet the multitude of staff involved and steps required creates process complexity that can hinder this goal. Leveraging a unique case study setting, this study deploys a collection of quality management tools to investigate how the use of separate support rooms for patient induction (the administration of anesthesia), case set-up, and case breakdown can reduce OR TT while maintaining safety and satisfaction. Key results show that separate rooms for patient induction and case breakdown can enable parallel processing, improve patient and staff safety, and patient experience. We use post implementation observations to measure TT reduction when using an induction room, which allows time for an extra case per day. We develop decision-support models practitioners can use to identify the potential benefits of separate support rooms during the OR turnover, based on operating conditions and surgical characteristics. We provide considerations from buffer theory and coordination theory for the separation of physical space, proposing a novel view of the OR turnover process as a set of service modules and interfaces.
