Prehab and tough love: how perioperative medicine is changing surgery

NHS Humber Health Partnership

By Daniel Pye

Dr Sasi Pathmanathan is the first perioperative medical consultant in England to be embedded within a vascular surgery team. When it comes to improving surgical outcomes, she says you need to be direct with patients – and enlist their families to help.

On the face of it, surgery may seem one of the least likely areas of care for patients to impact their own health outcomes. But for the vascular surgical team in Hull Royal Infirmary, there was a clear understanding that outcomes of the procedures they perform are very often shaped by the choices patients make before and after they see them in theatre.

This is where Dr Sasi Pathmanathan came in. She is a consultant vascular perioperative physician.

As a specialty, perioperative medicine is still quite new. The Royal College of Anaesthetists first created the training programme for it in 2014, with a view to improving surgical outcomes by optimising patient preparation and rehabilitation, as well as efficiency within medical teams.