Audit of pre-operative echocardiography requests in hip fracture patients

摘要

Patients sustaining a hip fracture should have 'surgery within 24 safe operating hours, subject to medical fitness' - a target introduced by the Scottish Government Health Delivery Directorate, to be achieved by 2007. A report [1] highlighted the fact that 15% of patients in our hospital failed to meet this target because of pre-operative echocardiography requests, compared to the Scottish average of 4.3% requests. This study aimed to quantify the number of patients with hip fracture at this hospital who had an echocardiogram before surgery, to establish the clinical indication for each echo cardiogram, to determine whether the request met British Society of Echocardio-graphy (BSE) criteria [2], and to consider whether the number of requests could be safely reduced.