Premedication in surgical day care patients

The purpose of this audit was to find out the efficiency of our system in providing premedication to surgical day care patients. This audit was conducted in the Surgical Day Care (SDC) Unit of a University Hospital. All patients anaesthetised in the SDC unit on day care basis were included in this audit. Nursing notes and preoperative orders of all patients to be anaesthetised were checked to see whether premedication was given or not and was the timing according to the orders written. The result showed that out of 205 patients scheduled, twenty (9.7%) patients did not receive premedication. Only 37.2% of our patients were receiving premedication according to the orders. The majority of the errors noted in our audit were system errors related to cancellation, rescheduling and admitting the outpatient in the inpatient ward.