Surgical Outcome Risk Tool (SORT) in emergency surgical patients for outcome assessment

American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) 1 to 6 ordinal scale is a popular and well-known method to predict outcomes after surgery. The Royal College of Surgeons of England in 2018 developed and standardised a system to predict morbidity and mortality in surgery. This tool is called SORT (Surgical Outcome Risk Tool). We have tested and validated it in our conditions in emergency surgical patients. This tool utilises operative procedure (given as a code number), the severity of the surgery, ASA, urgency, age, and cancer within 5 years. This tool can easily be used by putting the data in a handheld mobile application. The individual patient data is immediately converted using a multi-regression equation with beta coefficients for each variable and gives a score for instant prognostication. A SORT score of > 6 is associated with an 85.7% chance of mortality. The SORT tool was validated for a total of 245 consecutive patients who underwent emergency surgeries. Demographical analysis showed 76.73% (n = 188) men and 23.27% (n = 57) patients to be women. Of the total number of patients included, 182 patients were under general surgery care, and the remaining patients were from other surgical specialties. Maximum cases were of ASA 1 (had a SORT score of 0.3–10.13). The use of SORT in our patients of emergency surgery corroborated at a Kappa of 0.61, which shows substantial agreement with the actual surgical outcome SORT in Indian situations compared to ASA alone based on the physical status of the patient allowed much better prediction of surgical morbidity and mortality. SORT is a very useful prognosticating tool, whose results can be easily obtained and used in conjunction with clinical judgement.