Liu Minxia

    mllmx@msn.com

    HOW long would you expect it to take for a patient to be discharged from a hospital after undergoing thoracic surgery? The answer one Shenzhen hospital gave yesterday was within 24 hours.

    Shenzhen No. 3 People’s Hospital said it has performed outpatient surgeries on 200 patients with thoracic problems in the past four years and is expanding the efficient surgery to treat more lung problems, including pneumothorax, excessive hand sweating and lung nodules.

    Outpatient surgery, which allows patients to return home on the same day that a surgical procedure is performed, has been realized through improvements of surgical and anesthetic methods, as well as the use of enhanced post-operative recovery, said Qiao Kun, deputy director of the hospital’s thoracic department. “Patients can leave the hospital within 24 hours and for some, they can leave on the same day.”

    Outpatient surgery, also called day surgery, was first used in Western countries in the 1990s and has become a popular surgical method. Statistics show that day surgeries accounted for 85 percent of the total elective surgeries in the United Kingdom in 2014, while the proportion in the United States was 80 percent, Portugal 70 percent and Sweden and Spain 65 percent.

    “Outpatient surgeries can greatly improve the turnover of hospital beds,” said Lo Chung-mau, president of the University of Hong Kong Shenzhen Hospital. In Western countries, according to Lo, outpatient surgeries are being widely used to reduce the working hours of medical staff and improve efficiency, as hospitals with 500 beds are considered large in those countries.

    “In Hong Kong, 90 percent of eye surgeries are outpatient surgeries,” said Dennis Lam, president of C-MER (Shenzhen) Dennis Lam Eye Hospital. “Outpatient surgeries not only reduce the cost, but also the psychological pressure on patients, as they usually consider the disease less serious if they need not stay in the hospital for days.”

    An increasing number of Shenzhen hospitals have been promoting the use of outpatient surgery in recent years. The city’s hospital management center said Thursday that it plans to increase the proportion of outpatient surgeries in order to reduce the pressure on hospitals as well as the medical costs for patients, and will be piloting the plan in two or three hospitals this year.