Professionals in the city who find taking long leaves from work next to impossible are opting for short stay surgeries, that not only allow them to get home quickly after the operation but also help save up on costs. These surgeries are said to bring down overall costs by 15-20% and the discharge is done within a couple of hours or at the latest, the very next day.

Healthcare players like Nova Specialty Hospitals and Fortis Hospitals perform 150 and 30 short stay surgeries respectively each month, at their centres in Koramangala and Nagarbhavi. “Short stay surgeries can happen not just in eye-care and ENT, but also in areas like orthopaedics, general surgery, bariatric surgery, gynaecology, urology, surgical oncology etc,” says Dr MG Bhat, medical director, Nova Specialty Hospitals.

In addition to eye-care, which was worked around the short stay concept, now surgeries like removal of gall stones, joint replacements, minor fractures, weight-loss surgery, and even something like breast cancer surgery are taking to the new format.

Manish Parmar (name changed), a 35-year-old BPO employee, who sometime ago underwent a shoulder surgery, says he was admitted at 8am and got discharged the same evening. “Such quick surgeries are specially for professionals who can get operated on say a Saturday, rest on Sunday, and get back to work on Monday,” says Dr Susheen Dutt, ENT specialist at Fortis Hospital, Nagarbhavi.

Experts say short stay surgeries are performed on patients after screening them to check whether they meet the requisite criteria or not. “It is usually not performed on patients who are either very old, or very young, or have disorders like high BP, diabetes etc as such patients would require to stay back,” says Dr Dutt.
Patients are screened, given a date for the surgery. Post the surgery, they are allowed some time to stabilise and then discharged with sufficient medication and advise. And costs fall since there are basically no night charges levied as patients are discharged within hours.

Reproduced from DNA