I find these articles interesting as it seems that non-manufacturing contexts rediscover manufacturing principles constantly
Your critical path includes surgeons, your surgeons are a bottleneck, having minimal but non-zero prepped patients available is an inventory buffer
Amdahl’s Law from Computer Science and similar concepts would apply here as well. It seems sharing some of these concepts across domains would be useful in general.
Honestly expected to roll my eyes at the article (especially as it’s from the times) but this looks like a great initiative and Kariem El-Boghdadly who designed it, from an admittedly brief search for him, seems to know his onions. Not bad at all
https://www.guysandstthomas.nhs.uk/our-consultants/kariem-el-boghdadly
Seems good for the happy path, but I wish they would have said something about their plans for if something goes wrong.
Like you already put patient B to sleep but suddenly something went wrong with Patient A.
Will the team continue with patient A and leave patient B to wake up (skip him)?
Is there a backup team and facilities to continue with patient B as scheduled?
There are counter measures but which way did they go?