Via practica 2/2014

Preoperative assessment in outpatient department of general practitioner

The preoperative assessment is a typical example of procedure that requires multidisciplinary collaboration of internists and specialists in sub disciplines of internal medicine (e.i. cardiologists, diabetologists, pneumologists), anesthetists, physicians of all surgical disciplines and from Juny 2014 general practitioners (GP). Extensive preoperative tests, regardless the nature of the planned surgical procedure, and the individual patient condition, leads to unnecessary examinations with considerable financial costs, postponing of the surgery and finally to the patient traumatization. This paper provides a brief overview of current experts’ recommendations on preoperative examination and summarizes ways of determining perioperative risk.

Keywords: preoperative examination, components of preoperative examination, perioperative risk stratification.