Doctors told - surgery safer in daytime

Surgeons who do smaller, non-urgent operations at night would be safer waiting until daytime, the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons said yesterday.

College spokesman John Simpson said it was common for surgeons to conduct quick operations at night when there was a backlog of surgery.

Some doctors preferred night operations when they took less than 20 minutes and the patient was in a lot of pain.

"It is safer to leave the patient until the next day and have the full facilities available rather than do it at night," he told National Radio.

"In many incidents it is just as safe and probably safer to leave them until the next day."

At night surgeons had no immediate access to senior specialists if anything went wrong, and sophisticated laboratory testing and x-rays were not as readily available.

Mr Simpson's comments follow a report by the Health and Disabilities Commissioner into a late-night operation on an unnamed woman at an unidentified public hospital.

The woman suffered permanent injury after her spinal nerve was damaged during the non-urgent surgery on a neck gland, performed by a registrar named only as Dr B.

Commissioner Ron Paterson ruled that Dr B breached the code of patient's rights by failing to identify and protect the nerve.

"It seems probable that the risk of error is heightened when surgery is undertaken during night hours, with reduced backup available," he said in his report.

"Patients should not be exposed to this additional level of risk unless the surgery is urgent and cannot safely be postponed."

National Radio reported that seven district health boards told it they conducted night surgery only in emergencies.

- NZPA