Transcript: Scott Strong, MD, on Preparing Patients With IBD for Surgery

I'm Scott Strong. I'm a professor of surgery and a colorectal surgeon at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. I hope you found my presentation on the perioperative management of patients undergoing surgery for their inflammatory bowel disease both informative as well as helpful.

We talked about the preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative periods of patients with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis undergoing operative management of their disease. There are many ways that the patient, the gastroenterologist, and the surgeon need to partner to best ensure optimal outcomes.

The things that we typically think about are the patient's medications, their nutritional status, control of sepsis, and how all those things are managed during this perioperative period.

We know that patients with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, while they both have forms of inflammatory bowel disease, how we manage them during this perioperative period does differ in a lot of ways, and how we stage the operations also is impacted by these different factors.

There are a lot of different things that we need to consider and work in a collaborative way to set appropriate expectations for the patients and optimize our outcomes.