Abstract
Background: Our Trust consists of two separate hospitals with duplicated Orthopaedic services at both sites. Sterile Services were centralised to one site in February 2006. Various problems were encountered leading to cancelled cases. What have been the financial implications of these cancellations?
It is difficult to estimate the true cost to the Trust for a cancelled case. Each cancelled case is a ‘slot’ on an operating list that has not been filled. There are regular Waiting List Initiative (WLI) Lists – the number of these have increased. Could an empty slot on a regular list have been filled by a WLI case? Would the cost of the WLI case theoretically performed in the empty slot be the cost of the cancelled case? The model is basic and has many assumptions. Patients are allocated a slot on a WLI list for a variety of reasons, however with enough numbers and across enough time, the true cost must be somewhere near these figures.
Method: Every cancelled case coded as “Surgical Equipment: checking/malfunction/unavailable” between April 2006 and Mar 2008 (2 financial years).
The total number of WLI cases in the same period and the total cost of those cases.
Results: There were 239 cancelled cases for Sterile Services reasons across Trust April 2006 – March 2008. During the same period, there were 1,566 Waiting List Initiative
Cases Cost: £3,234,000 (£2,065 per case)
Conclusions: If all of the cancelled slots had been filled by WLI cases this would have avoided a total cost to the Trust of £493,535
The abstracts were prepared by Mr Matt Costa and Mr Ben Ollivere. Correspondence should be addressed to Mr Costa at Clinical Sciences Research Institute, University of Warwick, Clifford Bridge Road, Coventry CV2 2DX, UK.
