Day surgery: a need for guidelines

ABSTRACT

Day surgery is being increasingly carried out throughout the world. In our country the concept of day surgery is still in its infancy. In order to practice day surgery safely, we need to have guidelines as to the nature of procedures to be carried out, patient selection, discharge criteria instructions to the patients. We tested our locally devised guidelines on 203 patients admitted as day surgery patients between June 2000 and May 2002. We conclude that day surgery is a safe option with a very high patient satisfaction rate. It should be developed further and for its full utilization we need to have proper guidelines and protocols. Ideally there should be Day Surgery Units in all major hospitals