Health Insurance providers need us to organise an estimate of surgical expenses prior to approval. In addition to surgical costs, there are also hospital and anaesthetic fees which are covered separately by your provider. In order to obtain the most accurate information for your provider, we will give you details to contact these two groups separately. Sometimes your provider requires copies of clinic letters which we can organise for you.
We will give you a pre-op information pack and health questionnaire that need to be completed and sent or delivered back to the hospital where you will have your surgery. Inside this pack is information about when to stop eating and drinking, and when to come into hospital. If you have medications, such as blood thinners, we will advise you if and when they should stop leading up to surgery.
If you are having upper airway reconstruction for a sleep breathing problem and you are on CPAP, please bring this to hospital. We normally continue to use this whilst you are an inpatient, even if we are aiming to bring you off the CPAP in the long term. Smoking has major consequences on your operation and your healing. If you feel that you cannot quit outright, I recommend that you stop for at least the two weeks prior to your operation to improve these risks. Ask us about Quit Smoking information and packs.
When you arrive at the hospital you will meet the team looking after you. There are multiple processes to ensure your safety and you will go through numerous checks to confirm your identity and the operation you are having prior to surgery. The usual process for children is for a parent or family member to accompany them into the operating theatre. This has benefits for both the patient and family and we promote this contact to make the process as easy as possible. We also recommend that a parent stay overnight with their child if an overnight stay is scheduled.
Immediately after surgery you are transerred to the recovery room. If your child has had an operation, we usually ask a parent to come into recovery soon after your child has woken up. Everybody takes a different amount of time to wake up and it can sometimes be an anxious wait for parents, but we will get you in there as soon as we can. From the recovery room, you are transferred back to your ward and monitored throughout the rest of the day. If you are going home, we will make sure you are eating and drinking, up and about and passing urine. You will be given a prescription for pain killers, instructions for recovering, your first post-op appointment and a work certificate of you have asked for one. We will make sure you are safe to go. You will need to be driven home and have someone stay with you overnight. I will usually see you for your first post-op appointment between 3 and 6 weeks depending on the surgery you have had.
