Study of consultation in an Internal Medicine Department

Consultation in Internal Medicine is a common task of the attending labor o f the internist in a general hospital and is a relevant link for intrahospi tal cohesion. In the present work the characteristics of 738 consultations, which represented all consultation request forms received at our Departmen t during a nine-month period, were studied. A 55, 4 percentage of consultat ion forms were requested urgently and 93,6% of them were answered on the sa me day. Most consultation parts received came from General Surgery and trau matology, wit a predominance of cardiologic, pneumologic, infectious and mu ltiple causes. The assessment of the urgency made by the internist coincide d with the urgent request only in 38.3% of patients and 2% of them were tra nsferred to the Internal Medicine Department. The consultation was repeated for 22,5% of the total of patients. Only in 23.1% of cases an oral link wi t the referring physician occurred. To remark the relevance of the consulta tion for the optimization of cae quality to our patients and its influence on the inter-relationship between specailists in different fields of medici ne.