Assessment of the Necessity and Results of Cardiac Consultations Conducted Before Non-Cardiac Surgeries

Medical consultation includes requesting other physician to say his/her idea about the diagnosis made for a disease or the way of patient's treatment. Today, medical consultation is one of the main elements of medicine; therefore consultation request and responding to it must be completely based on logical and scientific bases. In this cross-sectional study, we studied the records of 300 patients hospitalized in the Amir-al-Momenin hospital, Semnan, Iran. In a one year period. Appointed information such as demographic data and consultation pages were studied, recorded in a provided checklist, and processed statistically.In this study, 15.7% (95% CI: 11.6-19.8%) of all requested consultations were necessary and 66% of all necessary consultations had been replied completely. The necessity of consultation was significantly related to the place in which the consultation was done (P = 0.009) and age of patients (P = 0.003), but there was no significant relationship between sex and necessity of requested consultation (P = 0.378).Our findings showed that only 15.7% of all requested consultations were necessary. Therefore, in order to optimize the trend of requesting consultations and responding to them, it seems necessary to teach the rules of scientific medical consultation to physicians.