The medical community can take several proactive steps to reduce and avoid unnecessary surgeries, improve patient care, and enhance overall healthcare quality and safety. Key strategies to prevent unnecessary surgeries include the following:
- Healthcare providers should adhere to evidence-based clinical guidelines, best practices, and recommendations established by reputable medical organizations, such as the American College of Surgeons, American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, American College of Cardiology, and American Urological Association.
- These guidelines provide evidence-based recommendations, indications, contraindications, and criteria for appropriate surgical interventions, diagnostic testing, and treatment options, helping to standardize care and ensure that patients receive timely, beneficial, and necessary surgical procedures based on their specific medical conditions, symptoms, and overall health status.
- Healthcare providers should also actively engage and educate patients about their medical conditions, treatment options, risks, benefits, alternatives to surgery, and actively involve them in the decision-making process to promote informed consent, autonomy, shared decision-making, and patient-centered care.
- Patient education, counseling, communication skills training, decision aids, informational materials, and consultations with healthcare providers can help to enhance patients’ understanding, awareness, knowledge, confidence, and involvement in their care, enabling them to make informed decisions. Encouraging patients to ask questions, seek second opinions, consider non-surgical treatment options, and participate in shared decision-making can help prevent unnecessary surgeries, reduce overtreatment, and improve patient satisfaction, trust, adherence, and outcomes.
By implementing these strategies and best practices, the Kentucky medical community can improve surgical care. They can help ensure that patients receive appropriate, necessary, and high-quality surgical interventions that optimize health, recovery, function, and quality of life, while minimizing the risks, harms, and costs associated with unnecessary surgeries and overtreatment.