[A descriptive study of intrahospital neurology service consultations]

Neurology consultations requested by other services are a part of hospital attention that has not been studied or valued enough. However, it is a health care activity that is carried out on a daily basis and which consumes considerable amounts of time and resources. AIMS. The aim of this study is to assess intrahospital consultations (IHC) requested from a Neurology service.

We conducted a retrospective study of the requests for consultations received in the Neurology Service at the Hospital Universitario San Cecilio in Granada throughout the year 2001. The following variables were analysed: number of consultations, specialities involved, urgency of the request, syndromic diagnosis, complementary tests requested, final resolution and referral of patients.

The number of consultations amounted to 270. The most frequent syndromic diagnoses were stroke (24.3%), epilepsy (13.7%) and dementia (11.7%). Internal Medicine, Cardiology, Vascular surgery and Oncology were the specialities that requested most consultations from the Neurology service. The most common complementary test was a computerised axial tomography of the head. 38.74% of the consultations were referred to Neurology outpatients for follow up. 40.5% of the consultations received were lacking in the information needed to understand the actual problem the patient was suffering from.

This study attempts to highlight the importance of IHC as part of the day to day activity within a Neurology service, with respect to the number of consultations, knowledge of the most prevalent neurological pathologies in other services and the resources used in this type of assistance. More studies are needed on this subject, since there are few references in the literature to reports that analyse this type of attention.