Saturday, December 30, 2006

Top 10 issues in hospital medicine for 2006---issue 5: perioperative medicine

The relationship between medical and surgical hospital services was adversarial in The House of God, representative of the hospital of a few decades ago. The epitome of good case management was to turf your patient to a competing specialty service whenever the opportunity presented itself. Nowadays that relationship is changing. A model of collaboration between hospitalists and surgeons is emerging.

The year 2006 saw the publication of three new resources in perioperative medicine which merit inclusion in this year’s top ten list:

The proceedings of the second annual Cleveland Clinic Perioperative Medicine Summit appeared in a September supplement to CCJM. There’s a world of helpful stuff there.

Guidelines for perioperative pulmonary risk assessment and management were developed by the American College of Physicians and appeared in the April 18 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

After a frustrating back-and-forth on just which patients should receive perioperative beta blockers the American College of Cardiology helped settle the issue, at least for now, with new guidelines.

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