Abstract:
This descriptive study aimed to investigate the incidence rate and causes of elective surgical cancellation (ESC) in a tertiary hospital, Bangkok in 2018 AD. The study subjects' records included all patients scheduled for elective surgery and cancellations on the day of surgery from all departments and all surgical specialties, except emergency cases. The data were collected by using study record form which was content validated by three experts, the total number of elective surgery using the hospital statistics was used for calculating the cancellation incidences. The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, and inferential statistics by one sample t-test. The results found that a total of 34,781 patients were scheduled, and 1,671 patients were cancelled. The cancellation incidence rate was 4.80%. Of eight departments, with the highest rate was cardiothoracic surgery (8.36%), and the lowest rate was obstetrics and gynecology surgery (2.53%). Of 1,671 cancellation cases, 73.43% were patient-related causes, 23.40% were hospital system-related causes and 3.17% were health personnel-related causes. The major reasons of patients were nonattendance of patients to the surgery and patients' status not ready. In conclusion, we recommend that the hospital managers should improve surgery scheduling, timely communication to patients and improve preoperative process efficiency to minimize ESC. Also improves database record keeping for monitoring ESC of the hospital.