Popularity of outpatient surgery centers leads to questions about safety

Wendy Salo was alarmed when she learned where her doctor had scheduled her gynecologic operation: at an outpatient surgery center. "My first thought was 'Am I not important enough to go to a real hospital?' " recalled Salo, 48, a supermarket department manager who said she felt "very trepidatious" about having her ovaries removed outside a hospital. Before the Sept. 30 procedure, Salo drove 20 miles from her home in Germantown, Md., to the Massachusetts Avenue Surgery Center in Bethesda for a tour. Her fears were allayed, she said, by the facility's cleanliness and its empathic staff. Salo later joked that the main difference between the multi-specialty center and Shady Grove Adventist Hospital — where she underwent breast cancer surgery last year — was that the former had "better parking."