The Global Elective Surgery Preparedness Index (GESPI) is a hospital-level assessment tool which will help you prepare your surgical services for times of high external pressure. It has been designed during COVID-19 but is relevant across all contexts during pandemic recovery and beyond. It contains 23 measures (‘indicators’) that has been shown to be associated with elective surgical capacity in a large international study.
There are huge waiting lists for elective surgery worldwide, and these are growing every day. Cancellation of surgery is harmful for our patients, increasing morbidity, disease severity and reducing quality of life. This tool aims to give you actionable targets to strengthen your elective surgery pathway. It will support you to upscale elective surgery capacity and reduce the number of cancellations in your hospital.
Complete the assessment for your hospital in ‘Rate my hospital’. This will allow you to benchmark your hospital’s current ‘preparedness’ against previous ratings (from July 2021), other hospitals in your country, and other hospitals in similar environments.
We recommend that you identify 3 to 5 indicators where your hospital performance is not as strong, and you think would be feasible targets for improvement.
Organise a meeting to discuss your hospital’s results with other surgical service leaders and managers in your hospital.
Implement change to strengthen your elective service across these indicators.
Remeasure your GESPI score after you have made the proposed changes (e.g., 3 to 6-months’ time)
You may wish to monitor data related to cancellations of elective cases, or elective surgical volume in your hospital to monitor the impact of change.
We will be running a pilot evaluation of implementation of this process in selected hospitals around the world in 2022/23. Please get in touch if this would be of interest.
This tool has been developed by an international team of 69 frontline surgeons, anaesthetists, critical care doctors, and other healthcare workers and managers and validated by 4714 collaborators in 1627 hospitals in 119 countries.
The team is part of the CovidSurg collaborative at the NIHR Global Health Research Unit on Global Surgery. You can read more about this initiative at: https://www.globalsurgeryunit.org/
Project co-leads: James Glasbey (j.glasbey@bham.ac.uk) or Aneel Bhangu (a.a.bhangu@bham.ac.uk)
Online app developer: Kenneth McLean
This will allow you to benchmark your hospital’s current ‘preparedness’ against previous ratings (from July 2021), other hospitals in your country, and other hospitals in similar environments.
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