What is a Post-Take?

What is the “Post-Take”? What is the “Take”?

I started this week on the general surgical post-take so I thought what better than to theme this week’s blog post on this topic.

You may have heard the above phrases bandied about either whilst in Medical School or during your training. In summary, it is essentially a system mainly utilised by general medical or general surgical units across the UK and involves patient flow.

Let me try and explain in a bit more detail the concept of post-take as best I can.

The “take”

When a patient arrives in hospital, it is usually via the Accident & Emergency (A&E) department. There are also other ways, such as rapid access clinics, but we’ll focus on A&E to keep it simpler. Here, they are triaged and reviewed by the A&E team.

Once reviewed, they are assigned to a specific specialty, usually general medicine, general surgery, or specialty medicine/surgery.

The specialty in question will accept the patient if appropriate, and the patient will then move to the relevant assessment unit. For example, A&E will refer a patient with abdominal pain to the on-call general surgical team, who will review the patient and accept them to be transferred to the surgical assessment unit. For medical patients, it is usually the medical assessment unit, or “MAU”.

The total number of patients who have been admitted onto the surgical or medical assessment unit in a 24 hour period comprises the “take”.

The “post-take”

Right, so what’s the “Post-Take” then?

This is basically the process which happens after the 24 hour period is up. All the patients who were admitted over this 24 hour period, i.e. the patients from the “take”, will be reviewed by a consultant on the “post-take” ward round.

A plan is then formulated for the patient by the consultant and they are either admitted to an appropriate ward, taken for an urgent intervention, or discharged from hospital. For example, the aforementioned patient with abdominal pain may have appendicitis which would require urgent surgery. If they had vomiting secondary to subacute bowel obstruction which had improved after initial management with nasogastric decompression, then they may just need admitting to a surgical ward for observation and continued conservative management. If, however, it is something more benign which doesn’t require hospital admission and can be managed at home or in the community, such as irritable bowel disease, functional bowel syndrome, or even stable diverticulitis, then the patient can be discharged directly from the surgical assessment unit.

Overall, this is the hefty process which entails the admission of patients into hospital under the general surgical or medical take. The assessment units form an interim facility between the internal hospital (wards) and A&E, where the patient can be admitted to for initial management and observation until a senior decision is made as to what the next steps in management will be.

So, hopefully that’s somewhat cleared up the mystery behind the post-take, feel free to drop any questions or comments below!