Shaoliang Wang (王韶亮)
Director, Plastic Surgery & Aesthetics Medical Center · Vice Chief Physician, Associate Professor, Doctor of Medicine · Lead Physician of This Site
Triage of a symptom after an operation · operative and post-operative complications · the decision to reoperate or to wait
Dr. Shaoliang Wang is Director of the Plastic Surgery & Aesthetics Medical Center at Chongqing West District Hospital and the physician responsible for this site.
His part on this site is the routing rather than the repair. When a patient telephones with a finding, the first thing he wants is not how bad it is but which way it is moving and when that changed, because a fever that came and went after an anaesthetic and a fever that is climbing on the fourth day are two different problems that can read the same on a thermometer. He asks what operation was performed and on which day before he asks about the symptom, and he asks what the patient is most worried about, because that names the thing he has to rule out. He examines the wound himself rather than working from a photograph, and he reads a temperature together with the pulse and how unwell the patient looks. He sends patients to the emergency department rather than to the clinic for breathing difficulty, chest pain, bleeding that firm pressure has not stopped, a one-sided swollen leg, or a drowsiness that is deepening, and he says so on the telephone rather than arranging to see them in the morning. When the answer is that nothing needs an operation, he says that too, and gives the interval at which it will be reviewed.
Clinical focus
The call is a decision, not a delay
The purpose of telephoning is not to be reassured. It is to move a finding into the tier it belongs to, which is a judgement that needs the operation, the date and the direction of the symptom, and which cannot be made from a photograph or from a description written down. A patient who reports a finding early is not wasting anyone’s time, and being told that nothing is wrong is a good result rather than a false alarm.
