Day Surgery Teams’ International Awards for Innovation

Ciska Usk, Mary Stocker and Anne-Marie Bougeard

Published: 13 June 2019

The Trust’s acclaimed Day Surgery team has earned an international accolade from their peers.

The unit, already recognised as a leader for day surgery performance and innovation, has now been endorsed internationally by fellow professionals.

Ground-breaking work at Torbay Hospital has been rewarded with first and second prizes at the International Ambulatory Surgery (IAAS) Congress in Porto, Portugal.

The team were chosen to present projects based on their innovatory work to the audience of clinicians.

The projects have transformed patients’ lives, improved their experience in hospital, reduced waiting lists, improved the efficiency of Trust clinical processes, reduced costs and acted as role models for health care organisations in the UK and abroad.

The projects highlighted covered the following:

• Speeding up the transformation of the breast cancer surgery pathway – from an inpatient to day-surgery service, now a UK top performer.
• Transforming day surgery emergency service. Already a UK leader in providing day case emergency surgery for abscesses, the team has implanted the same service for more complex conditions such as cholecystitis and appendicitis. This has saved patients waiting several days for surgery, improved the quality of care delivered, reduced the workload on the dedicated emergency operating theatre and freed up valuable beds.
• Providing a day case service for total hip replacements (building on the successful partial knee replacements service). This is a high quality pathway enabling patients to undergo a hip replacement without the need to stay in hospital for a single night which is only undertaken in a few places in the UK.

First prize was awarded to the emergency service team (Doctor Ciska Usk (presenter), Mr Kirk Bowling, Sister Alex Alen, Dr Theresa Hinde and Dr Mary Stocker) and second prize to the day surgery hip replacement service (Dr Anne-Marie Bougeard (presenter), Mr Mike Kent, Ms Jo Allen, Ms Bernie Sullivan, Dr Claire Blandford, Sr Alex Alen and Dr Mary Stocker) by the IAAS Congress.

Dr Mary Stocker, Consultant Anaesthetist and Director of Torbay’s Day Surgery Unit, said: All these innovations owe their success to the inspiration and hard work of the day surgery team working in collaboration with the multi-disciplinary teams from across the surgical division.”

Mary, President of the British Association of Day Surgery, added: “In addition to the two prize-winning projects our breast cancer service was selected for presentation in the anaesthesia section of the conference. Overall, three of fifteen papers selected for presentation in this section were from Torbay, which is a remarkably high percentage. This is a credit to the presenting personnel and to the entire day surgery team who developed these outstanding services.”