Publication:

Evaluation of POSSUM scoring system in patients with perforation peritonitis

Background Continuous audit of clinical practice is an essential part of making improvements in medicine and enhancing patient care. Recently, physiological and operative severity score for the enumeration of mortality and morbidity (POSSUM) scores has been developed, which would help to identify those patients who are at increased risk of developing complications and deaths. This scoring system is based on 12 physiological characteristics of patient and 6 characteristics of the surgery performed.

Methods This study was done in Department of surgery at Patna medical college, Patna, Bihar, India from April 2014 to October 2015 on 100 patients. Physiological variables were collected prior to induction of anesthesia and operative variable collected during operation chi-square test was used for expected and actual mortality differences.

Results In present study 100 patients of peritonitis due to different cause of intestinal perforation were studied. Comparison of observed and POSSUM predicted mortality and morbidity rates were done. Observed to expect mortality and morbidity ratio was 1.005 and 1.001 respectively and there was no statistically significant difference between the predicted and observed values.

Conclusions This study confirms and validates the findings of previous work that POSSUM is an accurate and reliable tool for estimating in-hospital mortality.