Surgical Apgar Score, Predictor of Post-Emergency Abdominal Surgery Outcome

Abstract

The surgical team always tries to provide consistently low incidence of major complications for patient undergoing any operation. Recognizing patients at high risk of developing a complication will contribute substantially to quality of operation and of cost reduction in surgery. In operating room, surgical apgar score (SAS) has helped surgeons for objective assessment of the operative course for postoperative prognostication instead of their gut- feeling. Here we prospectively evaluated postoperative complications according to SAS. This was a hospital based, single centre longitudinal prospective observational study from October 2014 to March 2015 including 66 patients. There was significant association between type of risk group according to SAS and occurrence of complication (P<0.001). Again, patient more prone to develop major complications including mortality in 30 day follow up had low mean SAS. Mean ASA was found to be inversely proportional to SAS. Increase in SAS was proved to be associated with good prognosis (P<0.0001). Thus, it was proven that SAS was significant predictor of outcome in terms of postoperative major complications including mortality in 30-day post emergency surgeries under general anaesthesia.