Is Majority Of Requests By Anesthesiologists For Cardiologist Consultation Unjustified?

Abstract

Preoperative consultation of a surgical patient by a cardiologist is intended to treat an inadequately treated cardiac condition before undergoing surgery. This can yield in terms of a new therapy, lead to optimization of the patients’ cardiac comorbidity, impact significantly in terms of perioperative management and potentially reduce postoperative adverse cardiac events. However, judicious use of preoperative consultation request is required both for avoiding unnecessary consultation, investigation and delay in proceeding with surgery as well as cost effective health care delivery. This mini-review is aimed at finding the practice patterns of anesthesiologists’ preoperative requests for cardiology consultations. Different clinical situations faced in preoperative evaluation of cardiac patients planned for non-cardiac surgery with regard to the need for preoperative cardiac consultation and a stepwise approach for determining the probable need of request is also presented.

Keywords: Anesthesia, Analgesia, Referral/consultation, Preoperative, Anesthesiologist, Cardiologist, Non-cardiac surgery