A good understanding of perioperative risk is useful for surgical and anaesthesia planning, and for informed discussion about risk and consent issues with the patient.
Subjective assessment of functional capacity does not correlate well with risk of major complications or death after elective non-cardiac surgery. This has been shown on multiple occasions including in the METS Study (Lancet 2018).
The Department of Anaesthesia and Perioperative Pain Medicine encourage the use of validated tools to estimate perioperative risk.
The NSQIP Surgical Risk Calculator has been produced by the American College of Surgeons and is applicable to the types of surgery we do at St Vincent’s Hospital. We encourage you to use this NSQIP calculator for all your patients.
All patients referred to PAC-Anaesthesia should have their NSQIP results copied in to the referral form.
The Duke Activity Scale Index can be used to objectively estimate a patient’s functional status.
WARNING about Internet Explorer: DASI Calculator doesn’t alter from the perfect score of 9.89 METs and 58.2 DASI
The ARISCAT risk index can be used to estimate the risk of post-operative pulmonary complications.
