Preventing missed surgeries for patients living in the community 

Outpatients awaiting emergency surgery typically wait for a surgical time to become available. When it does, the turnaround time is often short.

However, it can be challenging to connect with individuals without a phone, without transportation, or who may be unhoused, or have challenges such as substance use issues or mental health conditions.

They can miss their operating room (OR) time, critical pre-operative instructions, and crucial follow-up care - which can trigger further medical issues and have resource impacts across multiple emergency and community services.  

Identifying community service connections 

Sharing these common challenges, hospital and community partners identified that many of the individuals may have an existing relationship with one or more of the community services.

Using already-established centralized intake lines, they created a pathway to quickly identify the closest known community contact, make the connection, and support the individual to get urgent surgery within a matter of hours or days.  

Patients have a better experience and get access to quality care, with faster healing using fewer resources.  Surgeons and the system avoid cancellations of scarce OR times.

Next steps: A process for unattached patients 

The group is exploring the next challenge of connecting with and attaching individuals not yet known to any of the community services.
 

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