Table 6 Case study: improvised teamwork to create temporary capacity

“We had already got three hip fractures admitted from the night before, so they were on our list, and we had another four hip fractures come in, in the same afternoon. So, on the day those three were being done, another four came in. So I happened to be on call, so I sent a message in the WhatsApp group saying I’ve got three hip fractures and a fourth coming into the ED department

Our orthogeriatric team picked up on that, and they immediately came to the Emergency Department to see the patients. My trauma registrar colleagues picked up on it, and a couple of them came and did the consenting while I did the history-taking and examinations. So, making sure everything’s okay while they just did the consent and booked the patient into theatre, because they were going to be operating anyway. And they called the anaesthetist to come and see. So that worked really well, everyone just pulled their weight and got on

Because we knew we were going to have a busy week, I looked at the theatres list for the next day, knowing that there’s no way we could get all those cases done that day. We found a list that had gone down, so I spoke to theatre staff and asked them if they could maintain that list that had been brought down, if they had enough staff. Even though that list had dropped two weeks before, we weren’t notified about it

But they had enough staff to run a skeleton crew to keep that theatre running the next morning, so I stayed behind the next morning to finish the list, to do those extra cases.” [Surgery Registrar]