The Smart Theatres Project

The challenges the Smart Theatres Project aimed to address were:

1. Very high energy usage - with a significant impact on carbon footprint, very high cost to the trust, and lack of visibility and understanding of energy consumption in operating theatres.
2. Insufficient monitoring of environmental measures - temperature, Co₂, air changes per hour, air flow, footfall, and presence detection - to measure impacts.
3. How to understand the impact of estates failures on patient experience and clinical staff productivity.
4. How to correlate estates failures in the operating theatres with patients’ outcomes and reduce poor outcomes. For example, repeating a hip replacement due to an infection will cost x6 the original.
5. How can we reduce estates related failures in the operating theatres environment which will result in improvements in productivity and reductions in wait lists for operations?
6. How can we reduce estates related failures and drive predictive and preventive maintenance instead of reactive maintenance?

The Smart Theatres Project addressed the above challenges by:

• implementing new sensor technology and monitoring equipment to monitor environmental measures
• implementing an 'automated set-back mode' which triggers automatically when theatres are not operational, turning off devices and equipment to reduce energy use
• upgrading the incumbent building management system (BMS)
• creating a key indicator dashboard with 'alert' thresholds fed back automatically to estates help desk to improve operating theatre availability and performance – providing information as predictive not reactive to allow the team to resolve issues in the theatres before they caused  failures
• enabling detailed live data collection and integration/visualisation of BMS live data
• customising dashboards to display real-time energy usage and operating theatre environment, which then highlighted events and where thresholds were breached
• created a 'live' 3D model of all theatre’s assets

This image provides an example of the dashboard found on a touchscreen display installed in a smart operating theatre. A green outline indicated the theatre is fit for use, whereas a red outline signals threshold breaches requiring immediate attention.