INTRODUCTION A major factor affecting patients’ length of hospitalisation following head and neck surgery remains the use of surgical drains. The optimal time to remove these drains has not been well defined. A routine practice is to measure the drainage every 24 h and remove the drain when daily drainage falls below 25 ml. This study aims to determine whether drainage measurement at shorter intervals decreases the time to drain removal and hence the length of in-patient stays. PATIENTS AND METHODS A 6-month prospective observational study was performed. The inclusion criteria were patients who underwent head and neck surgery without neck dissection and had a closed suction drain inserted. Drainage rates were measured at 8-hourly intervals. Drains were removed when drainage-rate was ≤ 1 ml/h over an 8-h period. RESULTS A total of 43 patients were evaluated. The highest drainage rate occurred in the first 8 postoperative hours and decreased significantly in the subsequent hours. The median drainage rates at 8, 16, 24, 32 and 40 postoperative hours were 3.375, 1, 0, 0 and 0 ml/h, respectively. Applying our new removal criteria of ≤ 1 ml/h drainage rate, the drains were removed in 22 (51%) patients at the 16th postoperative hour; 37 (86%) were removed by 24 h after operation. In comparison, only nine (20.9%) patients could potentially be discharged the day after surgery if previous criteria of ≤ 25 ml/24-h were used to decide on drain removal. CONCLUSIONS Our 8-hourly drainage-rate monitoring has facilitated safe earlier discharge of an additional 28 (65%) patients on the day after surgery. This has led to improvement in patient care, better optimisation of hospital resources and resulted in positive economic implications to the department.
We suggest that whole-body vibration training plates may potentially induce benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. Manufacturers may need to make users of this equipment aware of this risk, and remind them to use it with caution.
The aim of this study is to examine the incidence of return to theatre (RTT) for post-operative haemorrhage following coblation and dissection tonsillectomy and to investigate those that required RTT more than 10 days post-surgery. Retrospective review of post-tonsillectomy haemorrhages requiring RTT from April 2005 to March 2009 was conducted. Of 2,541 tonsillectomies performed, 81% were by coblation and 19% by dissection methods. The overall RTT rate was 1.7%. No difference was found in the overall RTT rates for primary and secondary haemorrhage between the two techniques. However, the overall RTT rates for primary and secondary haemorrhage were higher in adults than children (P = 0.0456 and P = 0.0215, respectively). RTT for secondary haemorrhage during the first ten post-operative days occurred in both coblation and dissection tonsillectomy with no significant difference. After the first post-operative week, late secondary bleeding requiring RTT occurred only in the coblation group (P = 0.0676). Four patients required blood transfusion; all were in the coblation group, three of which were required during RTT in the late secondary haemorrhage (after 10 days). The post-operative RTT rates for coblation tonsillectomy did not reveal a change of trend over the 4-year study period. Our RTT rate for secondary haemorrhage is higher than earlier published results. A learning curve could not be identified in RTT for coblation tonsillectomy haemorrhage. Late secondary haemorrhages requiring surgical intervention have only been identified in cases performed by coblation and could potentially be life threatening as 33% (3/9) required blood transfusion. This phenomenon may be explained by a particular physiological healing process associated with coblation.
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