The debate revolving around the benefits and drawbacks of inpatient and outpatient forms of treatment has been now triggering many practitioners and patients due to the inability to define the most appropriate method between the two. To begin with, it is of crucial importance to define what is represented with each of the notions for the sake of further clarity. The concept of inpatient treatment is related to the patient’s stay on the hospital premises during the process of therapy and diagnostics. The latter form, on the other hand, is a synonym to the notion of ambulatory treatment, making it possible for the patient to spend the time outside the hospital if there is no direct necessity. Thus, the primary purpose of the following paper is to outline the level of safety in each case when it comes to infection contraction probability during both inpatient and outpatient surgeries on the basis of evidence recorded within the last decade.
Over the past years, a rapid increase in the cases of patients choosing an outpatient surgery created a demand to take a closer look at its actual benefits when compared to more “traditional” surgery conductions with patients having to spend a night after the interference at the hospital. Thus, in 2017, the first explicit attempt to conduct a comparative analysis was made on the example of total ankle arthroplasty surgery. According to the study, while the question of infection safety was not that radical in terms of inpatient treatment, as medical employees were to observe the patients overnight, the question of outpatient surgery was tackling the practitioners all over the world (Mulligan & Parekh, 2017). However, the results claimed the absolute majority of cases to result in success, claiming no evidence of increasing post-surgical infection risks. Another study, focused on the examination of arthroplasty procedures, displayed no major difference between both settings. The researchers implied that ambulatory treatment was a completely safe procedure even in the context of surgeries, preventing patients from contacting an infection during the hospital stay (Darrith et al., 2019). Thus, the overall analysis of the secondary data contributes to the fact of outpatient treatment having more advantages in terms of patient safety.
However, taking into consideration the reality of today’s healthcare segment and its countless challenges and areas that require improvement, the situation might not be as optimistic. In fact, many aspects of patient safety in modern hospitals are, for the most part, correlated with the notion of overall medical competence and sanitary norms within an establishment. Thus, it is of crucial importance to secure these issues before making a choice preferring one of the options more than others. This preventive aspect especially concerns the notion of outpatient care, as it is more trustworthy among the patients at the moment.
References
Darrith, B., Frisch, N. B., Tetreault, M. W., Fice, M. P., Culvern, C. N., & Della Valle, C. J. (2019). Inpatient versus outpatient arthroplasty: a single-surgeon, matched cohort analysis of 90-day complications. The Journal of Arthroplasty, 34(2), 221-227.
Mulligan, R. P., & Parekh, S. G. (2017). Safety of outpatient total ankle arthroplasty vs traditional inpatient admission or overnight observation. Foot & Ankle International, 38(8), 825-831.