[Study of inpatient consultation for the neurological services]

Intrahospitalary interconsultation (IC) to a neurology department is an infrastudied task within daily neurologic health care.

To evaluate the IC to a neurology department.

A one-year retrospective study was performed on the IC received in the Department of Neurology in the Hospital General Universitario "Gregorio Marañón" (Spain), to evaluate the reasons for consultation, the urgency of the request, concordance between initial clinical suspicion and final diagnosis, specialties involved, final diagnosis and management/deviation to the IC.

A total of 432 IC were analyzed. The most frequent reasons for consultation were cerebrovascular disease (19%) and control of already diagnosed neurological diseases (17%). The most frequent final diagnoses were cerebrovascular disease and acute metabolic encephalopathy (16% in both cases). With regard to management, three percent of the cases were admitted to the ward and 14% were sent to out patients for completing studies and/or follow up.

This study underlines the importance of intrahospitalary IC within the daily tasks and health care carried out in a neurology department in relation to the number of IC undertaken during the study period. It is also an excellent method to evaluate the neurologic manifestations observed in systemic diseases and neurologically study patients with diverse pluripathy.