The appointment of an internal medicine practitioner to a neurosurgical department: Advantages, and clinical and professional implications.

The increasing age and complexity of in-hospital neurosurgery patients have raised the number of consultations with Internal Medicine. This type of collaboration is discretional and lacks temporal continuity. The full-time appointment of an internal medicine practitioner to a Neurosurgery Department, with complete care attributions except for strict surgical work, is a feasible organizational option. This method minimizes the need for medical consultation, improves the perceived quality of care, allows neurosurgeons to focus on purely surgical tasks, provides an integral vision of the patient's condition, enriches the group with specialized non-neurosurgical knowledge, and raises the scientific level of the team. In our Neurosurgery Department, an internal medicine practitioner has been working as part of the staff for 14 years. We describe her medical activity duties, the advantages our department gains from her daily work, and the professional and working implications derived.