Operating Room Efficiency
Unlocking insights to transform
utilisation and capacity planning
About Children’s Health Ireland

Children’s Health Ireland (CHI) at Temple Street is an acute paediatric hospital caring for 150,000 children each year, including over 45,000 who attend the Emergency Department. Care is provided by 90 consultants, over 950 nursing staff, and other health and social care professionals.
The Challenge
CHI at Temple Street sought a detailed review of capacity to establish to what extent there was a need for an additional Operating Room to meet patient access challenges and accommodate service development plans.
This was against a backdrop of:
- Nurse staff shortages resulting in Operating Room closures
- Growing outpatient, inpatient and day case waiting lists requiring additional capacity
- Service developments and new surgical posts with limited potential to provide additional time.
“MedModus’s Theatre Capacity Review for CHI at Temple Street was very comprehensive. It went beyond merely studying existing capacity to incorporating future demand factors associated with children’s outpatient waiting lists and medical inpatient bed requirements”
Mona Baker, CEO, CHI at Temple Street
How MedModus Helped
Data models were built to quantify theatre capacity and effectiveness, waiting list demands, service development requirements and bed requirements.
Operating Room and hospital capacity data models provided a clear understanding of improvements using existing resources and those requiring additional capacity.
Utilisation Analysis
Our comprehensive analytical models clearly described in-session, sessional and overall utilisation for each Operating Room list. The analysis accurately quantified theatre closures, identified opportunities to improve utilisation and to re-allocate scarce sessional resources to better meet waiting list demand.
Requirements and Waiting List Predictions
Our analytical models married information from the hospital’s Operating Room System, Emergency Department System, Patient Administration System and ICD10 coding database. This created a clear picture of requirements, including existing waiting list demand, latent outpatient demand, as well as the need to improve emergency access and meet new service developments.
The Result
Our analysis identified improvement opportunities within existing resources as well as providing evidence confirming the need to provide an additional 2,500 hours of theatre capacity.
“The review, complete with detailed supporting analysis and recommendations, brought clarity to the theatre capacity decisions we had to make for the future”.
Mona Baker, CEO, CHI at Temple Street