Commission on Excellence and Innovation in Health

New Optimised Pre-Surgical Care Framework for SA

In a South Aus­tralian first, the Sur­gi­cal and Peri­op­er­a­tive Care Statewide Clin­i­cal Net­work (SPCS­CN) has devel­oped an Opti­mised Pre-Sur­gi­­cal Care (OPSC) Frame­work for patients under­go­ing an elec­tive surgery procedure. 

Through a struc­tured approach to assess­ing patient risk, the OPSC Frame­work pro­vides rec­om­mend­ed pre-sur­gi­­cal inter­ven­tions to opti­mise a patient’s health pri­or to under­go­ing an elec­tive sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dure. Suc­cess­ful opti­mi­sa­tion of patients’ health may improve sur­gi­cal out­comes and, in some cas­es, elim­i­nate the need for surgery altogether.

The SPCS­CN facil­i­tat­ed a suc­cess­ful work­shop in Sep­tem­ber 2022 involv­ing stake­hold­ers from across the South Aus­tralian health sec­tor to finalise the Frame­work and iden­ti­fy bar­ri­ers and enablers to imple­men­ta­tion of the approach across SA. This was fol­lowed with a sec­ond work­shop in May 2023 which iden­ti­fied and pri­ori­tised sus­tain­able, equi­table and scal­able oppor­tu­ni­ties to imple­ment the Frame­work in South Aus­tralia. Oppor­tu­ni­ties iden­ti­fied include explor­ing the fea­si­bil­i­ty of embed­ding OPSC into the new elec­tron­ic Statewide Refer­ral Man­age­ment Sys­tem (SRMS) and Clin­i­cal Pri­ori­ti­sa­tion Cri­te­ria (CPC) work and improv­ing access to presur­gi­cal health opti­mi­sa­tion resources and services. 

A dis­cov­ery exer­cise to inves­ti­gate the fea­si­bil­i­ty of oper­a­tional­is­ing the OPSC frame­work through dig­i­tal inte­gra­tion with the eRe­fer­ral sys­tem (SRMS) was com­plet­ed through a co-design process between the CEIH, a health tech­nol­o­gy con­sul­tan­cy and a broad range of stake­hold­ers includ­ing con­sumers and clin­i­cians from ter­tiary and pri­ma­ry health care. Ongo­ing work is under­way to col­lab­o­rate with oth­er health agen­cies and uni­ver­si­ties to con­sol­i­date exist­ing presur­gi­cal health opti­mi­sa­tion pro­grams and devel­op new ser­vices (e.g. allied health stu­dent pre­ha­bil­i­ta­tion clin­ics) to sup­port oper­a­tional­i­sa­tion of the framework.

If you’d like to be involved or learn more about the imple­men­ta­tion plans for the OPSC project, please con­tact CEIH.​SurgicalPerioperative@​sa.​gov.​au.