2.2 Methods
For emergency consultation, the doctor applying for consultation should
first contact the consultant of neurology department by telephone, and
fill in the electronic case application form, including name, age,
gender, number of inpatients, number of beds, specialty, reason and
applicant. The invited consultant should arrive at the applicant ward
within 10 minutes after received the phone. The urgent consultation was
often conducted by the chief resident in neurology department from
Monday to Friday, and by attending physicians on weekends and holidays.
For some cases to be difficult to deal with, the young physicians should
consult with the senior attending physician on duty.
After examining the data of the following patients, the neurologist
should perform a neurological examination and then propose a diagnosis,
further examination and treatment plan. For patients with multiple
consultations, the final consultation conclusion was the final diagnosis
in the study, which was obtained from the patient’s hospital discharge
records. This study analyzed the purpose of consultation, the spectrum
of consultation diseases, the distribution of non-neurological disease
departments, and the percentage of compliance with emergency
consultation criteria.
There were no reports of emergency consultation criteria for neurology.
Therefore, we had proposed the criteria for emergency consultation in
neurology as follows: (1) stroke within 24 hours; (2) cases of critical
illness requiring the assistance of the neurological physicians; (3)
acute gas poisoning within 24 hours requiring emergency hyperbaric
oxygen treatment; (4) other new emerging neurological disease symptoms,
neurological signs and imaging abnormalities; (5) recurrent symptoms
with poor therapeutic; (6) patients to be emergency surgery who had
neurological diseases previously for preoperative evaluation; (7) cases
with medical disputes.