Operating rooms (OR) are the pinnacle of energy usage for a modern hospital, using an average of 6% more energy per square foot than all other hospital departments. OR’s are also the center of financial activity in a hospital, generating up to 40% of a hospital’s revenue. Aside from energy usage and economic performance, operating rooms produce more than 30% of a hospital’s total waste, ⅔ of which is regulated medical waste, costing up to 20 times more than regular waste disposal. The combination of unsustainable and costly operating output calls for savings and efficiency enhancement through all sectors of sustainability improvement.

Over 50 million surgeries are performed annually in the United States, resulting in serious levels of labor and associated costs. While a surgery involves all sectors of the hospital to work in near-perfect harmony with each other, the largest contribution comes from the Central Processing Department (CPD). The CPD lays the foundation for each surgery, going through used biohazardous instruments from the previous surgery and quickly sterilizing and putting together the tray assembly for the next. This tedious process must be done precisely, therefore taking hours to assemble just one tray of surgical instruments. In addition, the same surgery performed by different surgeons have varying tray requirements due to each surgeon’s preferences. This variability further increases the error rate and slows down the productivity of the CPD, slowing tray turn over and surgery efficiency overall.

Forefront sustainable OR improvement studies have broadly focused on one of two main aspects: surgical tray optimization or waste management. Recent surgical tray optimization studies have shown significant savings in time and cost from the removal of unnecessary instruments on the surgical trays. Recent waste management studies have seen unsustainable waste management practices in all categories of waste, subsequently calling for safe and ecologically friendly practices to decrease environmental burden. 

Our study focuses on a broader implementation of current forefront sustainable efforts in the operating rooms. Specifically, proper education of segregating regulated medical waste and non-regulated medical waste and optimizing the surgical tray instrument setup.