A national day only surgery benchmarking basket.

Abstract

The efficient management of day surgery facilities benefits both patients and health administrators. Patients can benefit through minimisation of hospital stay while day surgery has the potential to increase elective surgery throughput and to reduce waiting times. This paper explores whether routinely collected morbidity data from Queensland public hospitals can be used to benchmark levels of day only surgery between hospitals. Thirteen procedures were identified that met criteria for inclusion in a day only surgery benchmarking basket. Queensland public hospitals and individual procedures were benchmarked against one another and analysed to determine whether hospitals performing the 13 procedures demonstrate the same rates of day only surgery. With the development of a clinically meaningful and administratively simple tool for comparing hospital day surgery rates using routinely collected morbidity data, the opportunity now exists for health services to compare the performance of clinical services both within and between hospitals. It is also suggested that the basket of procedures identified in this study could form the basis of a national day only surgery benchmarking process.