Emergency surgery preoperative delays: realities, economic impacts and gains of a second emergency operating theatre.

Introduction: Time-to-theatre (TTT) is a key performance indicator of theatre efficiency and delayed TTT incurs significant costs and poor clinical outcomes. An increasing Irish population in conjunction with an ageing population puts increasing pressure on emergency surgical services across Ireland. We examined our institution's experience with introducing a second emergency theatre and semi-elective theatre lists for acute surgical patients.

Material-Sparing Feasibility Screening for Hot Melt Extrusion.

Hot melt extrusion (HME) offers a high-throughput process to manufacture amorphous solid dispersions. A variety of experimental and model-based approaches exist to predict API solubility in polymer melts, but these methods are typically aimed at determining the thermodynamic solubility and do not take into account kinetics of dissolution or the associated degradation of the API during thermal processing, both of which are critical considerations in generating a successful amorphous solid dispersion by HME. This work aims to develop a material-sparing approach for screening manufacturability of a given pharmaceutical API by HME using physically relevant time, temperature, and shear.