Emergency Surgery Score as an Effective Risk Stratification Tool for Patients Undergoing Emergency Surgeries: A Narrative Review

Several risk stratification tools have been described for quantifying perioperative morbidity, mortality, and adverse events in patients undergoing elective and emergency surgeries. These tools help in decision-making, determining the prognosis and communicating it with patients and family members, and planning admissions to the intensive care units (ICU) if necessary. Emergency surgery poses quite a unique challenge in terms of deranged physiology, age, and comorbid conditions, and often carries a higher incidence of morbidity and mortality. Very few risk stratification tools are available to reliably predict the risk posed by emergency surgical interventions. One of the recently described tools is the Emergency Surgery Score (ESS), which comprises three demographic variables, 10 comorbidities, and nine laboratory variables, the scores of which add up to 29. Several studies have demonstrated that ESS reliably predicts morbidity, mortality, and the need for ICU admission, predicting infectious complications like pneumonia and renal failure. In this review, we analyze the current literature to investigate the efficacy and reliability of ESS as a risk stratification tool for patients undergoing emergency surgeries.