Plan and Operation of the National Survey of Ambulatory Surgery

The National Center for Health Statistics' (NCHS) recently released report, "Plan and Operation of the National Survey of Ambulatory Surgery," provides discussions on the background, development, and methods of the survey introduced by NCHS to gather data on surgical procedures and diagnostic treatments undertaken outside of a hospital setting.

Since 1965 NCHS, through its National Hospital Discharge Survey (NHDS), has collected information on surgical and nonsurgical procedures and treatments in short-stay hospitals throughout the United States. However, there were minimal efforts in place to capture these incidents during visits to outpatient and other freestanding facilities. In 1994 the NHDS was expanded to include the National Survey of Ambulatory Surgery (NSAS). The purpose of NSAS is to collect and disseminate information about surgeries occurring in hospital outpatient centers and other freestanding ambulatory surgery centers.

This report summarizes the background and development of NSAS and provides the survey's design and methodologies. The Appendix contain the legislative authority for conducting the survey, copies of invitational letters, and other data collection instruments. A feasibility study for NSAS, under contract to the Center for Health Policy Studies, was conducted in 1989.

Keywords: National Survey of Ambulatory Surgery, procedures, outpatients, hospitals

This page last reviewed January 11, 2007