Our handbooks provide practical advice and solutions when establishing day surgery pathways. The BADS Directory of Procedures and National Dataset lists recommended day case rates for nearly 300 operations and shows national day surgery performance by procedure and potential gains by maximising this.
BADS Handbooks
The British Association of Day Surgery handbooks provide practical advice on how to set up day surgery service, encompassing both generic and specialty specific information. They cover professional activities, including aspects of anaesthetic, surgical and nursing practice and organisational solutions relevant to implementing safe and efficient day surgery care.
Information for authors:
Please read the BADS Guide for Handbook Authors and the Contributors' Agreement.
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BADS Directory of Procedures & National Dataset
The BADS Directory of Procedures provides recommended day case rates for nearly 300 surgical procedures, arranged by specialty and defined using OPCS coding. The rates quoted are arrived at by a combination of reported practice from leaders in their field, actual rates from Hospital Episode Statistics figures and expert opinion and most are achieved by one or more hospitals, although some are aspirational.
The National Dataset is produced in collaboration with Caspe Healthcare Knowledge Systems using their hospital benchmarking solution iCompare. It shows the variation in day surgery performance of English hospitals for all the operations listed in the BADS Directory of Procedures and the potential release of inpatient beds and cost savings achieved if the quoted BADS targets are met.
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National Day Surgery Delivery Pack
The Getting It Right First Time (GiRFT) programme, the Centre for Perioperative Care (CPOC) and British Association of Day Surgery (BADS) have together developed the National Day Surgery Delivery Pack, which contains key principals for increasing and improving day surgery rates across the NHS.
National Day Surgery Delivery Pack
Competencies for the Day Surgery Team
Successful day surgery requires a day surgery team with the correct knowledge and skills to enable safe, early recovery and discharge but there is an absence of national guidance on supporting competencies. Applying in-patient competency criteria is inappropriate as differences exist in the principles underlying inpatient and day-case surgical pathways, the former is not being aimed at promoting early discharge.
The main part of this joint publication between the AfPP and BADS, sets out core competencies for the day surgery team essential for adult day surgery through admission, anaesthetic room, theatres, first-stage recovery and second-stage recovery and discharge. The two appendices provide recommendations over and above these core-level requirements to address the (1) more challenging situations that may arise in the adult day-case surgery setting and (2) additional knowledge and skills required for adult trained nurses or allied health professionals if paediatric day-case surgery is undertaken. These competencies are relevant for staff new to, or after a long absence from day surgery and acknowledge some members of the day surgery team may include non-registered practitioners. All can be used as a reference for workbook competency documents in place or in development.