Weekends

Weekend efficiency is really quite disappointing. I've written about the drive for efficiency and improved turnovers during the normal workweek, but none of this applies on the weekend. Part of it is due to cases being add-ons. They may not have had adequate pre-operative workup and planning. The anesthesia team needs to get to know the patient. There are only one or two rooms running so if there are multiple cases, we need to triage the order. But I wish things moved faster. Working on one weekend, I realized that there was a shortage of transport staff so it was faster for me to get the patient and bring them up myself; on a normal weekday, we expect patients to be readied before the prior case finishes. On one of the cases, there was no request for neurologic monitoring even though this was recommended by neurosurgery consultants days before; we had to call in our neuromonitoring technician, wasting half a morning. It took a lot longer to get equipment prepared and turnover operating rooms. And I understand all this; we're running at a much reduced staff. But it still frustrated me that a set of cases that should have been finished in half a day kept me up until midnight.