Perioperative Medicine: Managing Surgical Patients With Medical Problems

Medical handbooks rarely provide advice on what to do when your patient has to undergo surgery. Similarly surgical handbooks focus on conditions that need surgery, and the main problems caused by that surgery.

In contrast, Perioperative Medicine is a concise, practical text that gives junior doctors the guidance that they need to cope with medical problems in surgical patients that might occur early in pre-assessment clinic, the night before surgery, out-of-hours or on the wards post-operatively.

It is an invaluable guide to covering surgical patients, and appeals to a wide readership, including junior surgical doctors, medical doctors covering surgical acute admissions, and members of the hospital-at-night teams. It will also appeal to medical students interested in learning more about the practical management of patients, and all those who need to know how to sort out common, important and occasionally life threatening "non-surgical" conditions that frequently happen in surgical patients, such as heart attacks, strokes and asthma.

This handbook is an updated version of the handbook published in 2000 in the Oxford Pocket Medicine series, entitled Peri-operative medicine - managing surgical patients with medical problems. This new edition is fully revised and is written as a guide for trainees in surgery (and its sub-disciplines) dealing with day-to-day medical problems arising in surgical patients. It covers all the fundamentals of the medical care of surgical patients, with new sections on surgical oncology, theatre etiquette, and planning lists, with most text rewritten to reflect new headings and recent guidelines.

Joanna Chikwe is a specialist registrar in cardiothoracic surgery, who trained at the Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals. She is currently on a two year advanced surgical fellowship in New York, where she is due to take up a post as a consultant surgeon. She has an established track record in teaching and training for surgeons and allied health professionals. She has set up and run several highly rated national training courses, as well as in-house trainee teaching programs. She has published two textbooks, several chapters, numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, and is active in clinical research. Phil Jones obtained a BA(Hons) in Medical Sciences at the University of Cambridge and completed his studies at the London Hospital Medical College, being awarded the MB BS in 1994 by the University of London. His early postgraduate years were spent in acute specialties including Emergency Medicine and General Internal Medicine and he was awarded Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (London) in 1997. He then trained in Anaesthetics at St Bartholomew's and the Royal London Hospitals where he encountered surgical patients from every major specialty. He became particularly interested in intensive care medicine, major trauma and cardiothoracic anaesthesia, the latter augmented with a Clinical Fellowship at the renowned Harefield Hospital in Middlesex. In 2005 he was appointed as a Consultant in intensive care medicine and cardiothoracic anaesthesia at Bart's & The London NHS Trust. Axel Walther is a specialist registrar in medical oncology and Clinical Research Fellow at Cancer Research UK. Axel attended Oxford University Medical School and trained at the Hammersmith, Marsden and Middlesex Hospitals. Outside oncology, Axel's interests are GI medicine and cardiology. His research interests are genetic markers of cancer risk and outcome, and he has collaborated in the discovery of several low-penetrance colon cancer susceptibility loci, thought to make up part of the inherited risk of colon cancer. Axel has presented these findings at global conferences, published in and reviewed articles for high-impact journals and contributed to textbooks on cancer.