Day-case oral and maxillofacial surgery in a Nigerian district general hospital: scope and limitations.

Day-case surgery is becoming attractive worldwide to various surgical specialties, but there are few reports from West Africa. Between January 1987 and January 1997, 2980 patients who attended an oral and maxillofacial unit were operated on as day cases. This represents 65% of the 4585 patients who had oral and maxillofacial surgery during this period. Of these patients, 362 (12.15%) had general anaesthesia, while 2618 (87.85%) accepted local anaesthesia. Readmission is a failure of day-case surgery. In this series, it was due to bleeding in 80 of 102 cases of excision of submandibular salivary gland adenoma. We believe that day-case oral and maxillofacial surgery is safe and effective, but that caution should be exercised when operating on benign submandibular salivary gland neoplasms under general anaesthesia.