Fitness assessments before surgery

Along with many other investigations, there are other ways to assess fitness. You may see us in a pre-operative assessment clinic or during the clinic visit that you have with your surgeon and we may walk with you up and down the stairs for example or ask you to walk at speed and we were able to assess with how short a breath you get and how quickly you recover from that. This is a very simple test but it tells us an awful lot about how your body will deal with stress. We will also be looking at scans that may have been done for your surgery. As an anaesthetist I'm very much interested in what your lungs to look like in the CT scan. It gives us a good idea of how much lung tissue is working, where there may be areas of concern and this also helps guide the multidisciplinary team decision as to the appropriate type of surgery for you. Because it may be that if your lungs are not in a good position that we decide that general anaesthetic is not something that we should be offering you. And we will discuss this and explain the risks and complications with our patients to ensure that there is an understanding as to which way we are going forward and what is in the best interest of you as our patient.