[A descriptive study of intrahospital consultation to a neurological department]

Intrahospital consultation (IC) is a little analyzed activity within daily neurologist hospital care. It entails an extra investment of time and resources. This study aims to describe the number and characteristics of the IC to a neurological department in our setting and to emphasize its importance within daily neurological health care.

We performed an eighteen-month retrospective study of the requests for consultations received during this period in the Neurology Service of the Hospital General Universitario. The following variables were analyzed: demographic information, number and type of IC, time of response, syndromic diagnosis, complementary tests requested and resolution of patients.

224 IC in 210 patients were seen. The average time of response was 1.57 days, although it was modified because of type of IC (normal: 1.7 days; for preference: 1.5 days; urgent: 0.2 days). The specialities that requested most consultations were cardiology (12.9%) and internal medicine (12.5 %). The most frequent reasons for consultation were: signs and symptoms (27.2%), focal neurological deficit (22.8%) and cognitive impairment (17.9%). CT scan and MRI were the most common complementary tests. A total of 25.4% of patients were referred to neurology outpatient clinic for follow-up.

IC is an infrastudied activity in the literature. We consider it necessary to analyze this kind of care in every hospital in order to improve the organization and the planning of the day-to-day hospital activity