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.