A model for understanding the impacts of demand and capacity on waiting time to enter a congested recovery room.

Background: When a recovery room is fully occupied, patients frequently wait in the operating room after emerging from anesthesia. The frequency and duration of such delays depend on operating room case volume, average recovery time, and recovery room capacity.

Methods: The authors developed a simple yet nontrivial queueing model to predict the dynamics among the operating and recovery rooms as a function of the number of recovery beds, surgery case volume, recovery time, and other parameters.