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GIRFT data for anaesthesia and perioperative medicine on Model Health System can help to drive up day surgery rates

Getting It Right First Time data which can help NHS teams increase their day surgery rates and reduce patients’ length of stay (LoS) in hospital has now been published on the Model Health System.

Metrics for anaesthesia and perioperative medicine (APOM) have been added to the MHS platform as GIRFT builds on its work to support elective recovery by reducing waiting lists.

Users can register at https://model.nhs.uk/ and navigate to the GIRFT clinical metrics compartment for anaesthesia and perioperative medicine, or click here to go directly to the GIRFT APOM metrics if you already have an account.

The new metrics are drawn from the GIRFT national report for APOM, which was shared with NHS teams across England in 2021. The report found there was considerable variation in day case rates between trusts, from 36% to 77% of all surgical admissions. It recommended that perioperative and surgical teams should take responsibility for driving and delivering a culture of day case as the default option for many procedures, to significantly increase rates and help tackle the surgical backlog resulting from COVID-19.

GIRFT’s APOM data on the MHS aligns closely with the metrics and standards set by the British Association of Day Surgery (BADS), reflecting the collaborative relationship between the two organisations. In 2020, together with the Centre for Perioperative Care (CPoC), they jointly published a National Day Surgery Delivery Pack, building on the learning from best practice day surgery pathways to enable trusts to safely expand the amount of day surgery they undertake.

The new GIRFT MHS compartment features more than 100 cross-cutting metrics to support improvement across the three pathways – day case, elective and emergency surgery – which underpin effective perioperative delivery across all surgical specialties.

Clinical, trust and system users can see their performance in areas such as the percentage of emergency and non-elective patients receiving surgery on the day of their admission or length of stay for patients over 70. Frailty, deprivation and co-morbidity information is also included.

The 2021 GIRFT report was written by GIRFT clinical leads Dr Chris Snowden (consultant anaesthetist at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust), and Dr Mike Swart (consultant in anaesthesia and critical care at Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust).

Dr Snowden said: “The APOM gateway aims to improve the understanding of the quality and transformational progress of these pathways. We hope that regular use of these cross-cutting metrics as a baseline for surgical care will enable MHS users to more readily define the need for improving generic surgical pathway management alongside the specialty-based focus for improving perioperative care for patients.”

Dr Swart added: “We know that understanding and utilising perioperative care is key to the sustained recovery of surgery in the NHS, and these metrics provide an invaluable tool to support that.

“Everyone involved in anaesthesia and perioperative medicine should register for Model Health System and use their data regularly to keep track of progress as they work to continue driving up rates for day surgery and recover services.”

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