Der Chirurg; Zeitschrift für alle Gebiete der operativen Medizen
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Day surgery has been practised in Great Britain for many years. However, only in the last few years there has been a great surge of interest in the practice of day surgery. This has taken place despite many obstacles such as clinician's preference for more traditional approaches and initial lack of facilities and resources. ⋯ However, there is a wide variation in relation to performance of day surgery throughout the country between hospitals. This is true both for total number of surgical patients treated on a day care basis and for individual surgical procedures. Day surgery is now generally accepted as best option of treatment for over 50% of all elective surgical procedures and it is expected that by the end of this decade this figure is likely to be over 60%.
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Over the last twenty years, the most dramatic change in American surgical care has been the shift from inpatient to outpatient surgical care. Ambulatory surgery in the 1990s, with its demonstrated ability to lower individual patient and overall societal surgical care costs, while maintaining quality equal to inpatient services, has been embraced by all segments of the American health care delivery system. ⋯ It also appears likely that ever increasing numbers of surgical operations will be completed on an outpatient basis. Ambulatory surgery is one of those rare socioeconomic-political movements in which all participants have benefitted as demonstrated by public interest and demand, surgeon satisfaction, patient participation, and, most importantly, payer encouragement and mandate.