[Study of consultation in an Internal Medicine Department]

Consultation in Internal Medicine is a common task of the attending labor of the internist in a general hospital and is a relevant link for intrahospital cohesion. In the present work the characteristics of 738 consultations, which represented all consultation request forms received at our Department during a nine-month period, were studied. A 55.4 percentage of consultation forms were requested urgently and 93.6% of them were answered on the same day. Most consultation parts received came from General Surgery and traumatology, with a predominance of cardiologic, pneumologic, infectious and multiple causes. The assessment of the urgency made by the internist coincided with the urgent request only in 38.3% of cases. A clinical follow-up was made for 33.3% of patients and 2% of them were transferred 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 with the referring physician occurred. To remark the relevance of the consultation for the optimization of care quality to our patients and its influence on the inter-relationship between specialists in different fields of medicine.