Perioperative Care — The Three Stages of the Surgical Process

An accomplished doctor of medicine, Dr. Elliott Bennett-Guerrero serves as a professor and the vice chair for clinical research at the Stony Brook School of Medicine’s Department of Anesthesiology. Dr. Elliott Bennett-Guerrero concurrently oversees perioperative quality and patient safety as a medical director with the Stony Brook Medicine network of healthcare facilities.

Stressing the importance of preoperative and postoperative processes, the term “perioperative” refers to the surgical experience as a whole. In other words, it encompasses all three overarching phases of surgery: the preoperative phase, the intraoperative phase, and the postoperative phase.

The preoperative phase begins when a patient makes the decision to pursue surgery and ends when that patient enters the operating room. Depending on the specific procedure at hand, this phase may require a significant amount of physical and/or physiological preparation.

The intraoperative phase covers all activities that occur within the operating room. This includes all anesthesia, prep, and monitoring functions as well as the surgical procedure in and of itself.

The postoperative phase begins when the patient exits the operating room and includes all inpatient and outpatient recovery processes. Often ongoing, this phase only comes to an end when all postsurgical ailments and consequences are resolved.