These appointments are usually intended to review the results of your investigations and help formulate a treatment plan.
Mr Mathew believes in shared decision-making and will guide you through the various options. They may include non-operative management in the form of hand therapy, splinting, activity modification and painkillers or local anaesthetic and steroid injections. You may be required to keep a pain diary of you are having injections so that at the next follow up appointment an assessment of the efficacy of the treatment can be made. At times this may help guide further surgical intervention.
Alternatively they may include operative intervention, which may be performed under local (at the site itself), regional (a higher up nerve block, you may be awake during the operation) or under general anaesthesia (you are asleep during the operation).
The variety of options available, the individual risks and benefits of each procedure will be explained and an option tailored to your needs and demands will then be agreed on.
Most cases can be performed as a day case (no overnight admission), but some more complex cases may require an overnight stay.
Once this stage is reached, you will be offered potential dates for the surgery and depending upon the private hospital, the admissions team will advise you further of the admission process.
However these appointments are also used to review you after the surgery to remove stiches and also assess your progress after the surgery.
You may be asked to complete an audit questionnaire through the British Society for surgery of the hand. Your help in completing the form is much appreciated. If you do agree to do so, further one or two forms may be sent out to you as you progress with your recovery. These are extremely important as they help assess your response to the surgery and also help measure outcomes of various surgical interventions and improve on the treatments and patient experience.