Use the theatre list as it ran, not the list as it was printed

A cancelled case is visible. Someone drew a line through a name, or the information office can count “cancelled on the day.” Unused session time is quieter. The list started at 09:40 instead of 08:30. Turnaround between the second and third case took fifty minutes because the next patient was still on the ward. The session finished at 13:10 with an empty table and a consultant already in clinic.

If you only compare the Monday printed list with itself, you will congratulate the suite on a full day that never happened. The run sheet — the paper the coordinator marked as patients went in — is the document that contains the hour you lost.

In several Tbilisi suites the run sheet is still paper, folded in a drawer, and the “official” list is the reprint made on Tuesday morning after the order of cases changed. Giorgi will ask for both. When only the reprint exists, we label the analysis as a reading of intention, not of the session.

We do not publish a table of consultants. Late starts are often a sending-for problem, a porter delay, or a first patient who was never ready. Those causes live in the corridor and the ward, not in a ranking. A briefing that names the gap between planned knife-to-skin and actual time is usually enough for a surgical director to have the next conversation without our help.

Bring the messy sheet. The clean one is the one that hides the unused hour.