A study published in HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal is believed to be the first of its kind to link operating room design to the length of knee- and hip-replacement surgeries. The University of Kansas School of Architecture & Design associate professor, Xiaobo Quan, believes its findings can be used to optimize spaces that will both produce better outcomes, via shorter surgeries, for patients and boost the hospital's bottom line. In the work " Can Operating Room Design Make Orthopedic Surgeries Shorter, Safer, and More Efficient?: A Quasi-Experimental Study ," Quan observed in real time a series of 70 knee- and hip-replacement surgeries done side by side by same surgical teams in differently sized and laid out operating rooms at a Midwestern hospital.
The larger and better designed of the two rooms saw a significantly shorter average surgery time and a smaller number of troublesome, time-consuming interactions ("surgical flow disruptions"), for example, physical collisions among OR personnel and equipment, Quan found. "Previous studies looked at the impact of space design on the frequency of disruptions encountered, but they didn't control for the huge influence of the surgery type and the speed of the individual surgeon," the KU researcher said. "I think the beauty of my study is I controlled these two major factors.
" Quan said no previous studies had proven that environmental design could shorten the time of a surgical procedure. "The breakthrough for m.