Optimising Surgery Schedules: How Digital Theatre Management is Key to Reducing NHS Waiting Lists

NHS waiting lists for surgery have reached record levels, with over 7 million patients waiting for treatment. In response, the NHS has been adopting data-driven digital strategies to streamline operations, optimise resources, and reduce backlogs. One area seeing significant improvements is theatre management, where digital solutions such as Athera Pathways offer real-time oversight and proactive scheduling. These technologies are helping NHS trusts optimise theatre use, reduce cancellations, and improve patient outcomes, ultimately playing a crucial role in shortening waiting lists.

We’re sharing some of the top ways digital theatre management is making a difference:

1. Maximising Theatre Utilisation

Efficient theatre use is central to managing waiting lists. Underutilised theatres mean fewer surgeries completed and longer waits for patients. Digital solutions like ours offer:

• Real-time updates: Staff can monitor the status of theatres and patient flow, allowing quick adjustments to schedules and preventing downtime.
• Proactive scheduling: Digital systems like Athera Pathways flag underutilised or cancelled sessions early, enabling teams to reallocate theatres efficiently, reducing gaps between surgeries.

In the NHS, the Elective Recovery Plan focuses on using theatre capacity to its fullest, ensuring that every available slot is filled to reduce waiting times. Digital theatre management systems are critical to making this happen by providing hospital teams with the insights they need to optimise every available minute.

2. Reducing Surgery Cancellations

Cancellations are a leading cause of long waiting lists. Pre-operative issues such as incomplete patient assessments or unavailable surgical kits often lead to last-minute cancellations. So how does technology help?

• Providing alerts ahead of time for pre-assessment issues or other potential risks to scheduled surgeries.
• Giving teams the opportunity to resolve these problems early, reducing the likelihood of cancellations.

The NHS has recognised this issue and launched several initiatives aimed at reducing cancellations, such as improving pre-operative assessments and coordinating resources more effectively. Athera Pathways integrates these efforts, ensuring that potential disruptions are addressed before they cause delays.

3. Leveraging Data and Insights to Improve Efficiency

The NHS’ Data Saves Lives strategy emphasises the importance of using data to improve patient care. By providing performance metrics on theatre utilisation, delays, and cancellations, digital theatre systems allow hospitals to make data-driven decisions. Athera Pathways delivers:

• Dashboards showing key metrics, including reasons for cancellations, costs, and surgery outcomes.
• Reports that help hospital management align with national NHS initiatives and provide evidence for further funding or operational improvements.

Hospitals using these insights can respond quickly to issues affecting surgery throughput, ensuring that they’re continually improving theatre efficiency and reducing waiting times. NHS trusts have already seen success with similar data-driven approaches, identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

4. Supporting NHS Governance and Accountability

Strong governance is essential to maintaining safety standards and minimising patient risks. NHS guidelines and frameworks such as the PSIRF (Patient Safety Incident Response Framework) and the Digital Clinical Safety Strategy aim to standardise processes and reduce human error. Tech helps by:

• Providing audit logs that track every step of a patient’s perioperative journey, ensuring compliance with governance standards
• Reducing the risk of human error, which is a common cause of delays, missed steps, or poor patient outcomes.

Athera Pathways supports NHS hospitals by offering full visibility of patient and theatre data, ensuring that teams are always aware of what’s happening and can adhere to safety and compliance frameworks.

5. Improving Patient Outcomes and Experience

Digital theatre management systems not only benefit hospital operations but also have a direct impact on patient care. By reducing delays and cancellations, patients experience:

• On-time surgeries, which lead to better clinical outcomes.
• Faster post-op care as patients move through the system efficiently, preventing complications such as hospital-acquired infections.

The NHS has made patient safety a top priority, and reducing waiting times for surgery is a key element of improving patient outcomes. Hospitals that adopt proactive scheduling systems like Athera Pathways are able to deliver safer, more efficient care while meeting their targets for reduced waiting lists.