Check in time because often times will have an emergency come in the day before or the night before. I often take call the night before so I have OR time to do cases the next day. Generally, the hip fractures will go at the end of the day but occasionally I will have a 3 or 4 year old that we will need to do 1st case and scheduled cases get bumped. Rarely I’ll be operating through the night and it will bump my scheduled cases. Occasionally a major life threatening trauma will bump my cases.
Last week anesthesia canceled my first case at 6 am so they called my second case to come in ASAP. His normal check in time was 7:30 and He was even late for that as he did not arrive till after 8:30 AM which set the whole day off.
I generally tell patients, unfortunately the last patient of the day is often somewhat delayed and there may be some waiting time Things tend to get backed up at the end of the day. Most of these patients were just recently added on, so they’re glad to do it at an earlier date. The firstb case patient are usually scheduled much more in advance.
But I think of when I went to get my tires at Costco and had to wait several hours because they couldn’t find the special wrench to remove the guys tires in front of me for his BMW—things happen