[Paediatric one-stop surgery: a series of 75 cases]

By one-stop surgery is meant the performing of both the pre-surgery assessment and the surgical procedure on the same day. We report our experience with a pilot study on one-stop surgery in the province of Bizkaia, with a population of 124,494 children aged 1 to 14 years old. Under the new scheme, the patient average of four visits to the hospital outpatient clinics was cut down to only one. Diagnosis and pre-surgery assessments were made by the children's Primary Care Paediatricians at their NHS clinics. Seventy-five children were treated over 10 months. They had abdominal wall, genital or soft tissue surgery. Only two developed minor complications. Families were generally satisfied with the quality of the medical care received as shown by a survey: 32.7% scored it as "excellent", 36.2% "very good", 24.1% "good" and 3.4% "medium". We think that one-stop surgery is a breakthrough in ambulatory surgery. Not only does it dramatically lower the number of visits to hospital outpatient clinics, but also the waiting time for surgery, the costs, and the surgeon's workload, and helps streamline the Public Health Services and the quality of the medical care as perceived by both patients and families. Ensuring a close relationship between Paediatric Surgeons and Primary Care Paediatricians is paramount.