Aim:
Increasing number of older adults requiring Gastrointestinal surgeries. These patients have substantial risk of postoperative complications causing increase length of stay and readmission therefore increasing health care cost. Comprehensive Geriatric assessment has proven benefit in improving outcomes. Our service called Frail/older adult care of Colorectal and Upper GI surgery which provided Comprehensive Geriatric assessment to this unit and the outcomes were compared with previous year without our service to assess efficiency.
Method:
Prospective cohort study where CGA was applied proactively to all 70 years old and anyone above 65 requested from Surgical team from Feb’25 till now. The outcomes including Length of stay, readmission in 30 days, hospital acquired complications and discharge destination compared with the data from the previous year without FOCUS.
Results:
Total 291 patients were reviewed by FOCUS from September’24 to September’25. There were total 169 Upper GI and 122 Colorectal patients. The data from Sept’23 to August’24 was obtained to capture the baseline data prior to our service to compare. We compared average data of LOS, Readmission rate, HAC and discharge destination of FOCUS patients over the last 6 months with the baseline data.
Conclusion:
This study showed reduction of the average length of stay to 12 days, readmission rate from 21% to 12% and the numbers hospital acquired complication rate since proactive CGA were applied.