Articular cartilage surgery in outpatients: a pilot study.

Open knee surgery for the treatment of large symptomatic cartilage defects is routinely performed in the inpatient stay, where the patients are hospitalized for several days after surgery. This has implications for both costs for the health system and medical complications such as hospital-related infections. In this article, we describe for the first time that this type of operation can be performed as outpatient surgery without any complications for the patients and with good clinical results that in our sample do not differ from those reported in larger groups of patients who underwent surgery and were hospitalized thereafter.