The Royal United Hospital has set up a new clinic to speed up the process of seeing patients.
Patients with urgent general surgical problems such as appendicitis, gallstones, hernias, and abscesses will be able to attend a new urgent clinic.
The Emergency Surgical Ambulatory Clinic (ESAC) has been designed for patients suffering from these problems so that they can be seen, diagnosed and operated on quicker.
This avoids unnecessary hospital admissions and lengthy inpatient stays, and the RUH is the first hospital nationally to be managing emergency surgical patients in this way.
Emergency general consultant surgeon Sarah Richards, who leads the service, said: "The traditional process was that patients come in, investigations are ordered, there's a queue, and then a further wait for a decision.
"If an operation is needed, there's a further wait for that to be booked and a risk of cancellation, if something more urgent needs to take priority.
"The new clinic is really speeding things up - the RUH has provided resource not only for a consultant emergency surgeon to oversee the service, but has also purchased a dedicated ultrasound machine and provided extra theatre capacity to operate on emergency patients."
In the first six months of the new clinic opening 788 patients were seen.
Of those 71 per cent were seen and discharged on the same day, 12 per cent had their surgical procedure on the same day, and six per cent were added to the planned operating list for non-urgent surgery or were admitted to hospital.
Dr Richards said: "We recognise that the majority of our patients don't want to be admitted unless strictly necessary and this clinic is one of the many ways that the RUH is striving to work differently and more efficiently.
"The ESAC service is safe and effective and we have evidence that shows that it is contributing to a reduction in the time inpatients wait for emergency surgery.
"Managing general surgical patients in this way has also resulted in significant bed savings, as we're avoiding unnecessary hospital admissions, which allows inpatient resources to be allocated to life-threatening emergencies."
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