Tonsillectomy

Tonsillectomy is one of the most common surgeries performed in the pediatric population and West River ENT is no exception. We perform several hundred tonsillectomies on adults and children annually. The most common indication (in the pediatric population) is sleep disordered breathing. These patients have hypertrophic tonsils (and adenoids) that obstruct the airway making it difficult to breath at night. Often parents will bring in videos of their children sleeping, which is very helpful in making the diagnosis of sleep disordered breathing. Recurrent sore throat is another common indication for tonsillectomy particularly in the adult population. As part of our commitment to our patients we follow up with them after their tonsillectomy. We track their complications and outcomes. In our pediatric patients we ask parents to fill out a pre-operative tonsil symptom score survey. Four months after surgery parents are asked to complete the survey again. As you can see from the graph below our patients have a large reduction in tonsil symptoms. We are proud to have very few complications; our serious postoperative hemorrhage rate was 0.6% (0% in pediatric population) in 2018 and had zero readmissions for dehydration.

Scores are based on a pre-tonsillectomy and a 4-month post-tonsillectomy tonsil
symptom survey completed by parents of pediatric tonsillectomy patients.