Enhanced recovery shortens the hospital stay in IBD surgery too

The edition in brief

Today's general surgery edition leads on enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) extended to patients with inflammatory bowel disease, a group often excluded from the original colorectal evidence. A meta-analysis found ERAS cut hospital length of stay by about 1.6 days without raising readmissions, reoperations or complications, at moderate certainty for the length-of-stay benefit. A surgical-oncology meta-analysis asked whether resecting metachronous liver metastases from non-colorectal, non-neuroendocrine GI primaries helps: survival favoured surgery at one year, with heterogeneous studies and probable selection bias weakening the longer-term signal. A nationwide patient-reported-outcome study of primary ventral hernia repair found broadly comparable long-term pain and function across robotic, laparoscopic and open approaches, with less scar dissatisfaction after minimally invasive repair but slightly higher patient-reported recurrence after laparoscopic than open. A pearl reaffirms avoiding routine nasogastric decompression after elective abdominal surgery. The practice-changer is a randomised trial in laparoscopic gastrectomy where multimodal opioid-sparing analgesia roughly halved postoperative ileus and sped gut recovery, supporting it as a default perioperative strategy.