Pre‐admission clinics in day surgery. The ‘one‐stop shop’: tools and methods for practice improvement and service development

Abstract

The improvement of services aligned to day surgery is a still prominent topic in government policy debates and an important development area for many NHS trusts. This article attempts to describe the emergence of the ‘one-stop shop’ approach in surgical outpatients and preoperative assessment clinics. It portrays the ways in which one clinical team moved their ideas forward to develop an integrated, multidisciplinary service, and describes the tools and methods they adopted to cross the borderlands between practice development and service improvement, to enable success. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.