ABSTRACT
Background: Health care workers have a primary responsibility to do no harm to all patients. Like every procedure, surgery of any type carries varying types and intensity of risk. One of these risks is on-towards bleeding. Prevention of this risk is a major challenge. In many settings, health care workers embark on laboratory tests and feel secure. International guidelines have been proposed that emphasize to take preoperative bleeding history and advocate a rationale approach to the use of coagulation tests. To see how far the practices are compliant with standard recommendations, we examined frequency of obtaining bleeding history and doing coagulation test/screen during preoperative assessment
Material and Methods: Practice of preoperative bleeding history taking and doing coagulation screen was studied in 735 patients for six months duration. Findings are compared with BCSH guidelines and other studies
Results: Bleeding history was obtained / documented in 156 [21.2%] cases out of 735. In 141[19%] patients out of 735 patients undergoing surgery, coagulation screen was tested. In 9.9% of those tested, a justification for doing the coagulation test was found
Conclusion: In preoperative settings, bleeding history is significantly ignored and there is an over use of lab facilities in assessing the bleeding risk. There is a space for improvement by implementing the guidelines and sensitizing the surgical/anesthesia teams about the importance of structured history taking. Important points to be considered during proper history taking, have been proposed