Abstract Aim Laparoscopic cholecystectomy is increasingly being performed as a day-case globally, and the previously held notion of ‘interval cholecystectomy’ is now being abandoned in favour of ‘hot cholecystectomy’. Cholecystectomy for acute cholecystitis is associated with an increased risk of operative difficulty and intraoperative complications. The aim of this study was to assess the safety of day-case early cholecystectomy for acute cholecystitis. Methods Data was collected over a three-year period (February 2022 to January 2025) on patients who were booked for ‘urgent’ or ‘very urgent’ laparoscopic cholecystectomy for acute cholecystitis. Data analysis was done with IBM SPSS Statistics 29.0.1.0. Results A total of 190 patients (age range 22 - 96 years, mean 53.4) underwent urgent or very urgent laparoscopic cholecystectomy for ‘hot gallbladder’. Of these patients, 145 (76.3%) were discharged on the same day, while 45 (23.7%) required overnight admission due to surgical difficulty or significant co-morbidities requiring monitoring. Out of the 145 day-case patients, the mean intraoperative difficulty score was 2.34 (on a scale of 1 to 4), with surgery durations ranging from 25 to 205 minutes (mean of 80.5 minutes). Only four patients (2.8%) were readmitted within 30 days due to chest pain, postoperative pain, collection and hernia but none required reoperation, and there was no mortality. Conclusion Day-case laparoscopic cholecystectomy for acute cholecystitis is safe and feasible for the majority of patients, even in complex cases. These results support the increasing role of early and day surgery in the management of acute cholecystitis.
Jesudoss et al. (Fri,) studied this question.