The process of consensus building

Every day a large number of surgical procedures are carried out on an increasingly aging population. There is little evidence on how drugs and techniques used in the perioperative setting can affect mortality. Furthermore, due to the complexity and magnitude of the problem, this evidence is generally not readily available to physicians. Thus, the need for a Consensus Conference about perioperative medicine, debating only high-quality evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs), is evident.