Journal of

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Background: Operating room efficiency is a major determinant of hospital cost. Maximizing throughput, while maintaining quality, is therefore paramount to maintenance of financial viability. Cancellation of surgery may increase a hospital's cost and affect the efficiency of operating room and waste of resources. This study was conducted to determine the rate and causes of canceled surgeries, and identifies areas for improvement in a teaching hospital in Tehran.

Material & Methods: We carried out a descriptive study of the reasons for canceling scheduled operations. Data were collected during 9 consecutive months. The reasons for cancellation were identified by theatre staff. We grouped all the reasons into 13 reasons. Other necessary information like operated surgery was obtained from IT department. Descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage, 95% confidence interval) were used to analyses of data.  Statistical analyses were performed using SPSS and Excel Microsoft office.

Results: in this study, 18.2% of the 3381 scheduled operation were canceled on the day of surgery, 32.1% of them because of vascular surgery, followed by orthopedics (18.7%), general surgery (15.5%) and nose and throat surgery (13.7%). The common reasons for cancellation were lack of theatre time, clinical change in the patient's condition, lack of paraclinic tests and consultant's report on patient flow problems, blood preservation, drug and necessary equipment for surgery. 

Conclusion: This study demonstrated that most cancellations of scheduled operation are due to hospital deficiencies and medical team reasons that most of them are preventable. Several changes like better infrastructural facilities, enhanced interdepartmental communication are suggested to try and reduce the cancellation rate.

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Background: However nurses are responsible for patients quality care legally and ethically, in other side, patients have rights to receive appropriate and quality care. The aim of this descriptive study was to explore SERVQUAL dimensions (Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance and Empathy) of Nursing Service Quality (NSQ) at Tehran Social Security Organization (SSO) Hospitals.
Material and Methods: This study was carried out as an applied, descriptive and cross- sectional study during the summer and autumn of 2009 in Tehran SSO hospitals. Study tool was prepared on the basis of the standard and modified questionnaire of SERVQUAL based on Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry questionnaire (1988) for NSQ and consisted of 4 dimensions which were Reliability, Assurance, Empathy, and Responsiveness. The population for this study included of all inpatients of selected Tehran SSO hospitals who were selected by random sampling (N=200). For accounting Means, Standard Deviations and percents SPSS (ver. 16) have been used.
Result:The total percentage of NSQ was upper middle (66), prescriptively Reliability (74), Assurance (69) and Empathy (64) were the most ones and Responsiveness (58) was the lowest.
Conclusion: The results of this study showed that NSQ was in desired degree from patients` perspective in selected hospitals. The health care managers should have been attention to nursing as an important workforce of a hospital for raising the service quality of their organizations .Nurses are main role in quality care improvement and patients satisfaction. So, actions regarding to improve their performance are useful and necessary. Due to lowest score of Responsiveness among nursing staff, we suggest training courses for improving organizational culture on responding and effective communication to achieve high quality performance of all nursing group staff.