It is very dependent on the operation. So, people can go home from an operation the same day. If you’ve had a little lump removed under a local anaesthetic, you can literally walk out of the recovery room and just go home. If you’ve had a laparotomy – which is a big open cut in the abdomen, where we go inside and ferret around to get your bowels out and things, that can take a good couple of weeks.
We try to keep people in hospital for as little time as possible. So, even after a really big sort of esophagectomy, which is where you have to go in the tummy and in the chest, two big cuts, and take a big portion of your oesophagus – which is your food pipe out – and join everything back together. It’s very high risk. You can, in theory, go home as soon as day eight or nine after the operation, but that doesn’t mean you’re fully recovered. So, getting to go home doesn’t mean the recovery is over. It just means we are trying to reduce the complications we can give people in hospital.
When you’re at home, you can get much better walking around in your own environment. You encourage people to walk, so people in hospitals think they should be in bed all the time – definitely not. You’re at less risk of hospital acquired infections, and other complications of being in hospital, blood clots and things like that. So, we always try and get people home as soon as we can, or we can send them to somewhere like a rehab place in the meantime, if they’re sort of older and more frail, so that they’re in a less high -risk hospital environment but getting more physio support.
After say a bowel cancer operation, in theory if it’s robotic and it’s simple, sometimes you can go home after two days – but it can be sort of eight or nine days, depending if you have a complication after surgery or if you’re in a lot of pain.
So, the recovery is definitely based on the operation, the type of operation, and what happens. Keyhole operations and robotic operations – you are much more likely to go home earlier if you don’t have a complication than an open operation, and that’s mainly pain related, as well as sort of complication related.
