from Hacker News

London hospital cuts waiting lists with innovative system

by chris_overseas on 1/14/24, 8:04 PM with 5 comments

  • by biomcgary on 1/14/24, 10:59 PM

    This works great when you have an excellent surgeon and surgeries that are unlikely to entail surprises (which seems to be how they are applying it).

    This approach probably doesn't scale for surgeries that inherently have more contingencies. You really shouldn't be anesthetizing patients that might not be operated on if the previous patient in the queue has complications.

  • by netsharc on 1/14/24, 9:41 PM

    Seems like the sub-heading is the real non-clickbait summary of the story: "Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital has slashed its elective backlog by running two operating theatres side by side"

    TL;DR: they're running it more like a CPU pipeline, instead of the surgeon "idling" while the patient is being anaesthetized, they start anaesthetics with patient n+1 while patient n is being operated on.

  • by chris_overseas on 1/14/24, 8:05 PM