Editor's preface
Although surgical sub-specialisation within the specialty of ‘General Surgery’ has progressed rapidly over the last decade or so, most general surgeons on-call, irrespective of their sub-specialty interest, require a core knowledge in both elective and emergency ‘general’ surgery in order to be able to see and treat undifferentiated referrals and conditions outwith their normal everyday elective ‘specialist’ practice. This volume of the Companion to Specialist Surgical Practice provides the background information on these key areas of ‘general surgery’ for all practising general surgeons in both the elective and emergency situation. It is the only volume in this series which provides detailed descriptions of evidence-based medicine and how surgical outcomes can be measured, in addition to other important areas common to all of ‘general surgical practice’. These include an overview of day case surgery, abdominal hernias, thrombo-embolic prophylaxis, the management of sepsis and the intensive care patient, the use of scoring systems in patient assessment and surgical nutrition. This volume should be considered complementary to the other more specialist volumes in the series by including all the emergency areas which remain within the remit of the general surgeon on-call. As in everyday practice, there remain emergency patients who, having been resuscitated and a diagnosis reached, might be better served by referral to a colleague or unit with the relevant sub-specialist interest. This volume discusses those conditions which the general surgeon might be expected to deal with and, where appropriate, identifies those which might be better managed by a ‘specialist’. In these cases the reader will be referred on to the relevant specialist volume of this series.
Acknowledgements
Once again I remain grateful to my long-suffering wife and family for their ongoing support and understanding in the time taken for me to complete the Fifth Edition of this volume ofCore Topics in General and Emergency Surgery. The success of this volume, as for previous editions, very much lies in the quality of the chapters produced by my co-authors and I am grateful to all of them for the hard work that has obviously gone into writing, or re-writing, each chapter and their timely delivery. The additional workload required in the writing of concise, well-referenced and up-to-date chapters for a book such as this, by busy practising surgeons, should never be under-estimated. I would also like to recognise the support of Elsevier Ltd, as well as the help, enthusiasm and friendship of my co-editor of all five editions of the Companion to Specialist Surgical Practice series, James Garden.
Simon Paterson-Brown, Edinburgh