ABSTRACT
Patients who require emergency exploratory laparotomy face all the same challenges as patients requiring elective surgery described in the other chapters of this book. Unfortunately, emergency patients do not have the luxury of time to have their preexisting medical conditions properly assessed and optimized, investigations completed, and any physiological derangements corrected. Because of the rapidly progressive course of the surgical presentation, patients often require surgery outside of normal operating hours, and so both the surgeons and the anesthetists responsible for the patient may be inexperienced at managing such complex cases. These are some of the factors contributing to the observation that emergency abdominal surgery exposes the patient to a high risk of morbidity and mortality.
