The guarantee of financial sustainability of the health system is a subject on the agenda, and so there is an urgent need to focus on minimizing inefficiencies and eliminating waste, using a strategy of optimization of resources available, which should be seen as a shared responsibility involving all levels of management.
In this sense, the concern of hospitals and all health institutions should be based on the promotion of efficiency and cost-cutting, without ever jeopardising equity in the access, the safety of patients and the quality of health care to be provided to patients.
The first step towards efficiency consists in the identification of the production lines, the clinical areas and support services with greater consumption of resources, seeing as they are the ones that represent a greater contribution to cost reduction as is the case with the Operating Block.
The Operating Block is considered one of the services with the heaviest weight on the hospital's budget, whose management must be based on concepts such as efficiency, effectiveness and efficiency. The Operating Block's management challenges are complex and interdependent not only due to the need for allocating a large number of health professionals but also due to the material resources and level of technology involved in the surgical activity – whereby, a management model of the Operating Block considered to be viable must have as its starting point a holistic and integrated vision of the whole system.
Besides the Operating Block, Human Resources are the corporate area that entails the highest costs, estimating that about 50% of hospital costs correspond to costs with human resources, which alone proves the influence of this topic on hospital efficiency.
