TRANSFORMING SURGICAL WAITLIST INTO A ‘PREPARATION LIST’
With
Dr Andrew Marks,
Staff Specialist Anaesthetist & Director of Perioperative Medicine,
Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney, Australia
Dr Kanika Chaudhri,
Anaesthetic Senior Resident Medical Officer,
Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney, Australia
CASE STUDY
Filmed in Sydney, Australia | January 2026
The DIAMONDS initiative aims to transform the surgical waitlist into a “preparation list,” enabling healthcare professionals to optimise patient care in the months leading up to elective surgery starting at pre-admission phase.
Patients are will be able to complete pre-admission forms online, receive timely updates, and access educational resources to ensure thorough preparation. This will allow staff to spend more time with patients.
The DIAMONDS pathway, which stands for ‘Digital Pathway of Improved Assessment, Management and Optimisation of Patients for Planned Surgery’ has commenced at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney, Australia.
patient care by streamlining assessments and addressing the challenges of the existing paper-based system.
“Staff benefit by having centralised patient information and automated routine tasks, allowing them to focus on providing high-quality care, which ultimately leads to a smoother, more efficient process for everyone involved”, says Dr Kanika Chaudhri.
“Patients benefit from user-friendly tools that enable them to complete pre-admission forms online and access educational resources, enhancing their care experience,” she said.
DIAMONDS is led by the New South Wales, Northern Sydney Local Health District, with collaboration partners Australian Institute of Health Innovation (AIHI) and the George Institute for Global Health.
Source: Adapted from NSLHD news and events
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Dr Erandi Hewawasam is a Research Fellow at the National Perinatal Epidemiology and Statistics Unit within the Centre for Big Data Research in Health at University of New South Wales (UNSW). Her work focuses on maternal and reproductive health, chronic diseases (e.g., kidney disease, endometriosis), and early-life outcomes. She is the Program Manager for the Fertility Medicine Data Asset for Australia (FM-DATA), an MRFF-funded national infrastructure project linking fertility, hospital, Medicare, pharmaceutical, and perinatal datasets covering more than 40 million individuals. She also coordinates the Early Life Course Platform, integrating around 20 New South Wales and Australian federal administrative datasets to support population health research.
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Professor Perminder Sachdev graduated from the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, in 1978 and completed his MD in Psychiatry there in 1983. Following time in New Zealand, he relocated to Australia, where he completed psychiatric training and a PhD at UNSW in 1991. His doctoral work examined ethnopsychological concepts in Māori culture. His early research focused on drug-induced movement disorders, including akathisia, tardive dyskinesia and neuroleptic malignant syndrome, while his later work has centred on dementia and pre-dementia syndromes, particularly neuroimaging, biomarkers and risk factors.
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Kaylee is currently a research fellow with the Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre at the University of Tasmania. She has recently submitted her PhD thesis, reporting the findings of her research on developing upper limb motor biomarkers of dementia. She has postgrad degrees in physiotherapy and experience working in the community and aged care across Tasmania for several years, where she worked with people with dementia.
