One model was characterized by hospitals with designated emergency surgery departments and the other featured hospitals without an emergency surgery department in which surgical emergencies were subdivided among various general and specialized surgeons. Similarly, some hospitals had designated trauma teams while others had no such designated units. CP673451 datasheet However, despite the heterogeneous

complexity of emergency surgery in a worldwide context, the work of surgeons around the globe appears remarkably similar regardless of the name attributed to the facility in which they practice, be it emergency surgery, acute care surgery, or another generic title. Although it is difficult to succinctly define emergency surgery, which includes a broad spectrum of procedures, a universal definition could be poly-specialized surgery performed for traumatic and non-traumatic acute diseases. We have considered non traumatic emergency surgery as non CNS life-threatening diseases requiring urgent operative intervention (within 24 hr) with the exception of Selleckchem AZD5582 those requiring total cardiac bypass. There is a significant difference between traumatic and non-traumatic acute diseases. The dispersion of trauma programs sponsored by the American College

of Surgeons has resulted in the near-uniform management of trauma patients around the world. By contrast, the management of patients with non-traumatic acute diseases (intra-abdominal infections, bowel occlusion, etc.) ON-01910 remains poorly standardized and varies dramatically between treatment centers. Standards for the management of non-traumatic acute diseases are just as Tolmetin important as those of ATLS. Practitioners of emergency surgery worldwide must develop standardized guidelines to streamline protocol and designate organizational models used to address acute diseases requiring urgent surgical intervention; this ambitious effort is the primary objective of the World Society of Emergency Surgery (WSES) and its publication affiliate the World Journal of Emergency Surgery (WJES).

In recent years, the WSES has focused on non-traumatic acute diseases, proposing standardized protocol guidelines and prospective studies shared worldwide. In 2011, WSES published the first set of universal guidelines for the management of intra-abdominal infections in the WJES [2]. This article was an executive summary of the final recommendations approved by the consensus conference held in Bologna, Italy, in July of 2010 during the first WSES convention. These guidelines were recently updated following a multidisciplinary collaboration of international contributors [3]. In 2011, the WSES also presented guidelines for the management of obstructive cancer of the left colon [4] as well as guidelines for the diagnosis and management of adhesive small bowel obstruction [5], both published in the WJES.