Emergency laparotomy clinical outcome according to patient characteristics, level of postoperative care and time of surgery

Abstract

Emergency laparotomies have poor outcomes with variable postoperative critical care provision [1-3]. All patients requiring an emergency laparotomy with an estimated risk of death of >10% should go to critical care. Time of surgery should not affect standard of care [3,4]. In advance of the National Emergency Laparotomy Audit (NELA) results [2], our objective was to see whether the level of postoperative care and time of surgery affect outcome.