AVIATOR

This study is now completed. Thank you for your support.

Study Overview

We recruited 40 hospitals across London and South East England who participate within the PLAN network. Data collection took place in January 2016 across a 5-day period. All elective work was included, except for elective obstetrics. Emergency work was also excluded from the data collection.

This project demonstrated that theatre inefficiency is a recurring problem across all 40 sites who submitted data, with none achieving the Royal College of Anaesthetist Standards for efficiency across all 3 markers reviewed.

The presence of an Anaesthetic trainee was felt to have had a positive impact on theatre efficiency in the majority of instances, and educational reasons were infrequently cited as contributing to inefficiency.

There were a small number of recurrent factors leading to theatre inefficiency, which were consistent across London; of which only one was related to clinical parameters, with the remainder being related to non-clinical factors such as patient transport and staff being available.

Individual sites demonstrated differences in the factors which lead to theatre inefficiency - this may provide scope to develop future quality improvement projects focusing on these issues.

Site specific data was disseminated to sites in January 2017, along with overall pan-London data. A subset of the data looking at the perceived impact of trainees on theatre efficiency was presented at the 2017 AAGBI Winter Society meeting, with the corresponding abstract published. Further abstracts are being developed for submission, in addition to a paper with more in depth statistical analysis, aiming for publication in Autumn 2017.

AVIATOR leads

• Dr Kate Grailey

• Dr James O'Carroll

• Dr Mevan Gooneratne

• Dr Anil Visram

• Bart's and the London School of Anaesthesia (NE)

Core committee

• Daniel Martin

• David Highton

• Carsten Bantel

• Harriet Wordsworth

• Helen Laycock

• Phil Hopkins

• Sibtain Anwar

• Carolyn Johnston

• Pete Odor

• Sam Bampoe

• Sioned Phillips

• Anil Visram

• Mevan Gooneratne

• James O'Carroll