The intention of creating this service in Saskatoon was to improve timeliness of care, with the added benefit of improving surgeon satisfaction. An improvement in timeliness of care would be identified as a reduction in the proportion of afterhours surgery, a decrease in wait time to

surgery, and a reduction in post-surgery length of stay. In this study we had the advantage of being able to compare data for wait time to surgery between two hospitals: St. Paul’s Hospital with the ACS service and Royal University Hospital without this service. After implementation of the ACS service we were expecting that there should be a reduction in the wait time to surgery for acute general surgery cases. We defined wait time to surgery as the time period Depsipeptide from when surgery was deemed necessary and booked to when surgery was initiated. In the year following implementation of the ACS service,

the wait time was shown to be decreased by an average of 29 minutes (Table 1). Every Monday through Friday, from 12:00 h – 17:00 h LEE011 nmr there is one dedicated operating theatre reserved for acute general surgical patients. Therefore, this statistically significant reduction is a reflection of the dedicated operating room time given to the ACS service. Wait time to surgery was compared to the non-ACS, Royal University Hospital data for this same period. It was noted that there was also a reduction in wait time to surgery; however, this reduction in wait time was not statistically significant. The statistically significant decrease in wait time to surgery at St. Paul’s Hospital, but not at Royal University Hospital, is in keeping with what one would predict within an ACS system, and supports the findings of other Canadian studies [1]. Afterhours surgery is associated with increased morbidity and mortality [10–12]. One of the desired effects of an ACS service is to reduce afterhours surgery and to subsequently avoid complications. Our study supports previous findings [7] that with

a dedicated ACS service, CHIR-99021 ic50 there are a greater proportion of emergency operations completed during normal work hours (Table 2). Previous studies showed that within an ACS system there was a significant decrease in the post-operative length of hospital stay for patients who underwent surgery for appendicitis [11] or acute cholecystitis [8], but not for acute bowel obstruction [3]. Our data is not in keeping with these previous findings. As shown in Table 4, there was no statistically significant decrease in the length of stay for patients who underwent an appendectomy, or cholecystectomy. This may be explained by the fact that the pre-ACS length of stay was already short, compared to these other studies [3, 8, 13]. An ACS service may have an impact on post-surgical length of stay, because of hypothesized reduction in complications, and more focused care of admitted acute care patients.