Operating room management
Hospital Operations
Definition. Operating room management is the planning, scheduling and coordination of surgical resources to deliver safe operations efficiently.
Explanation
Operating rooms are among the costliest hospital resources. Manufacturing efficiency principles have been applied to shorten turnover in robotic knee arthroplasty (Hiraoka et al., 2025). Safety is part of the same system: team performance during the surgical safety checklist affects outcomes (Al Abbas et al., 2024).
Typical metrics include utilisation, first-case start, turnover time and cancellations.
Related concepts
Surgical safety checklist Lean management Bottleneck Appointment scheduling
Read on The Health Topics
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- Patient Safety in Surgery: Insights from 2024–2025 Research
References
Al Abbas, A. I., Meier, J., Daniel, W., Cadeddu, J. A., Bartolome, S., Willett, D. L., … Zeh, H. J. (2024). Impact of team performance on the surgical safety checklist on patient outcomes: An operating room black box analysis. Surgical Endoscopy, 38(10), 5613–5622. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00464-024-11064-7
Hiraoka, A., Swinnen, B., Vandeputte, A., Franssen, W., & Leirs, G. (2025). Optimizing operating room efficiency in robotic-assisted total knee arthroplasty through manufacturing efficiency principles. Journal of Experimental Orthopaedics, 12 (2), Article e70283. https://doi.org/10.1002/jeo2.70283
Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Operating room management. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/operating-room-management/