Short Cut To Breast Surgery Welcomed

An innovative new approach to breast surgery that allows women with breast cancer to return home on the same day as their surgery has been praised by the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

Having seen the success of the treatment in action on a visit to one of the pioneering centres in Birmingham with Health Minister Paul Burstow, he has asked the NHS to look at how this model can be applied to other types of surgery so that more patients can benefit from a more streamlined service.

Surgeons in Birmingham reviewed the way breast surgery patients were dealt with in a bid to improve the service. They realised that a fundamental redesign would mean that patients could be back at home much more quickly.

The process involved reviewing clinical procedures, listening to patients' views and integrating treatment between hospitals and the community.

Women who have had the streamlined treatment have been very positive about the approach, as they don't need to be in hospital for several days and can go home and recover in comfort. As a result, the average stay for women undergoing breast cancer surgery, including mastectomies, has fallen from five days to less than one - saving the hospital an estimated £300,000 a year.

This model of breast surgery, developed and supported by NHS Improvement, is currently available in 72 hospitals.

This means that 45% of the population can access it, but, through NHS Improvement, further work will mean breast cancer patients - for whom this treatment would be appropriate - can access it in their area. This will greatly improve women's experience in hospital, potentially saving 61,000 bed days and the NHS £10.5 million a year.

NHS Improvement will also be looking at how this innovative approach can be applied to other forms of surgery such as colorectal, urology and gynaecology.

Nick Clegg said: "This is the NHS at its best. Surgeons saw women were spending too long in hospital, they overhauled their approach to the treatment and the result is happier patients and huge savings to the NHS.

"This treatment works, It's better for patients and it is expanding so that more women can access it. But it's important that the NHS now looks at how this innovation can apply to other types of treatment, so that even more people can benefit," he said.

Health Minister Paul Burstow said: "No one wants to spend longer than they need to in hospital. The improvement in patient experience and outcomes as well as the savings in time and money are absolutely fantastic.

"So we have asked NHS Improvement to look at helping hospitals to cut bed days for other specialties such as colorectal, urology and gynaecology, for example by using models to enhance recovery. If that happens, we could be looking at savings of over 200,000 bed days per year.

"The NHS needs to make £20 billion savings - it's initiatives like this, led by clinicians, that are going to make that happen," he said.

Mr Hamish Brown, Consultant Breast Cancer Surgeon and part of the team that conducted the review with support from NHS Improvement at City Hospital, Birmingham, said: "The whole team looked very carefully at how we managed the patients' hospital stay and we found that we could integrate a lot of the inpatient care into a pre-operative visit to produce a more effective service.

"Although we had concerns that patients would be unhappy at going home so early, we found the opposite.

"Patients prefer to be at home and, to a large extent, they drove the move from a one night stay to day case.

"This initiative has been identified as national best practice and if it were rolled out to the rest of the country it would save many thousands of unnecessary days in hospital for patients."

(BMcC/GK)