Useful Management Information

Minimum Referral Criteria

Does your patient meet the minimum referral criteria?
Category 1 (appointment within 30 calendar days)
  • High risk surgery (e.g. vascular surgery, major intra-cavity surgery, neurosurgery)
  • High risk clinical factors (e.g. known cardiac or respiratory disease, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, cirrhosis, neurological diseases, malnutrition)
  • Urgent or semi-urgent (Category 1 or 2) surgery
  • Older age (>70 years) and/or frailty
  • Past anaesthetic or peri-operative complications
  • Receiving anticoagulants or anti-platelet agents
Category 2 (appointment within 90 calendar days)
  • Moderate risk surgery (e.g. amputation, orthopaedic surgery, head and neck surgery, major breast and plastic surgery)
  • Moderate risk patient (e.g. hypertension, obesity, obstructive sleep apnoea)
Category 3 (appointment within 365 calendar days)
  • No category 3 criteria

If your patient does not meet the minimum referral criteria

  • Assessment and management information may be found on a range of conditions at HealthPathways
  • If the patient does not meet the criteria for referral but the referring practitioner believes the patient requires specialist review, a clinical override may be requested:
    • Please explain why (e.g. warning signs or symptoms, clinical modifiers, uncertain about diagnosis, etc.)
  • Please note that your referral may not be accepted or may be redirected to another service

Essential Referral Information

  • Relevant medical history (including past surgical history), comorbidities and
  • Medications (including over the counter (OTC) and complementary medications)
  • Details about planned procedure, surgeon, and informed consent procedure (if known)
  • Usual exercise tolerance and level of physical activity
  • ECG (for patients with past cardiac history or multiple cardiac risk factors)
  • Bedside spirometry (for current smokers and patients with known COPD (Results of any past echocardiograms in patients with known heart disease (if available)
  • INR levels (for patients receiving warfarin)
  • FBC & ELFTs results (for high risk patients or patients undergoing moderate to high risk surgery, or known renal or liver disease)

Additional Referral Information

  • Spirometry (for current smokers and patients with known COPD (if available)
  • Copies of correspondence received from surgeons, anaesthetists (if available)
  • Scheduled date of surgery (if known)
  • Nutritional status / report from dietitian review (where appropriate and if available)
  • Pre-operative functional status and any other psychosocial factors that identify the patient as potentially requiring increased care needs at home at the time of discharge following the operation
Last updated 21 February 2025

Send Referrals To

Smart Referrals

Not available

Secure Web Transfer

Not available

Internal Referrals

Fax

Not available

Post

Not available

Enquiries

Not available

Related HealthPathways

No directly related pathways found

Service Availability

Facilities

Robina Hospital

If you would like to send a named referral, please address it to the specialist listed above, who will allocate a suitably qualified specialist to see the patient. Alternatively, you can view a full list of our specialists.

Gold Coast Health - For Clinicians
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