Background: Outpatient management has proven to be the most useful method of treatment for various minimally complex surgical specialties compared to day-hospital management or ordinary inpatient processes, a fact confirmed by numerous technical documents and works in the literature.
Methods: We analyzed 27,713 surgical interventions carried out in our hospital between 2005 and 2017. This analysis included all interventions for which the indication of the level of care has moved, over the years, to an outpatient setting. We evaluated the direct costs of these services, comparing them by year and by treatment setting.
Results: From the analysis of costs in general, for the same number of services, a reduction of 56.6% can be seen in the comparison between 2005 and 2017. In addition, the analysis of the length of stay shows an average reduction in the number of days of hospitalization from 2.9 to 1.2 between 2005 and 2017. On the basis of a large quantity of data, our study confirms that outpatient surgery can have a significant impact in reducing costs and days of hospitalization, even in a pediatric setting, demonstrating that it is the best choice in terms of saving resources and, above all, clinical and organizational appropriateness.
Conclusions: Outpatient surgery is in fact a valuable solution that provides an advantage for both the patient and his/her family, especially in the pediatric field, for the hospital and more generally for the health system as a whole.