Background
Timely treatment is one of the key principles of acute care. Delays to surgery are associated with numerous complications including increased infection, surgical complexity and even mortality. While anecdotally theatre access is a frustration, we had no local data on the matter.
Methods
Time to theatre was measured for all patients having acute surgery in a main operating theatre at Hutt Hospital by Plastic surgery. The initial audit was for a month long period in December 2025. Given the effect of public holidays a second audit was completed for a six weeks beginning on 1st March 2026. Patients receiving procedures performed in the emergency department or in the local anaesthetic procedure suite were excluded, as were patients on planned acute lists. Times were measured from the submission of acute surgery booking form to the operation start time. Wait times were benchmarked against the acute category on the booking form.
Results
Information was gathered on patient demographics, type of surgery, wait times, frequency of breaches and association with day of booking. In December, 89 consecutive cases were identified. Only 45 cases (51%) had surgery within the benchmarked timeframe with less than half of category 3 patients having surgery within 8 hours. While paediatric patients had significantly lower wait times, with 85% having surgery within the recommended timeframe, there was no statistically significant association between age and wait times for adult patients. This is likely due to the “pole case” system where otherwise well patients with short procedure booking times (</=60min) are selected the night before.
Conclusion
Given the frequency of wait time breaches, more needs to be done to improve theatre access. Objective data is required to advocate for change and improve care for patients.