Adult tonsillectomy and day care surgery.

Objective: To evaluate the safety of adult tonsillectomy as a day care surgery

Methods: Records of 664 patients above the age of 12 years, who underwent tonsillectomy were analysed. These patients were operated in our department within January 1999 and September 2002. Only 13 patients (1.95%) had post operative bleeding and were readmitted after discharge. The data of these patients were collected from medical records as well from the morbidity meeting proceedings and was reviewed retrospectively. Statistical analysis was done by using 'one sample t-test'.

Results: Overall incidence of post operative bleeding was 1.95%. None of our pateients bled with 12 hours of Surgery, 0.3% had bleeding between 12 to 24 hours after tonsillectomy and 1.65% encountered bleeding between 24 hours to the 6th post operative day. Bleeding was not major in majority of patients as only 0.45% of the patients required second anesthesia to control the bleeding and only 0.35% of patients required blood transfusion to replace the lost blood volume. In addition, higher incidence of bleeding was seen in males, in the older age group of 31-40 years, patients with obstructive sleep aponea and in patients where tonsillectomy was done by electrocautry dissection.

Conclusion: Based on these observations, we conclude that Adult tonsillectomy can be safely preformed in our setup.