Perioperative care brings together the people, decisions, and processes that support a patient from the time surgery is being planned through the procedure and into recovery. This hub explains the concept and points readers toward more specific guides.
What you will find in this section
- A patient-friendly overview of the topic area and how it relates to surgery.
- Focused internal guides that answer the most common questions in this section.
- Contextual links to related perioperative topics so readers can navigate the site more naturally.
- General educational information that supports conversations with qualified healthcare professionals.
What perioperative care means
Perioperative care is broader than the operation itself. It includes preoperative evaluation, risk assessment, medication planning, intraoperative management, postoperative monitoring, and coordination between different members of the healthcare team.
This team-based view is useful because many important questions are shared across the surgical journey. A concern that seems purely preoperative, such as how to manage a medication, can influence intraoperative planning and recovery decisions as well.
Why the concept matters to patients
Patients often interact with several professionals around the time of surgery, including surgeons, anesthesia clinicians, nurses, and sometimes other specialists. Understanding the perioperative framework can make those encounters feel more connected and less fragmented.
It also helps explain why instructions sometimes come from different people. Each role contributes to a specific part of the overall plan, and the best outcomes usually depend on that coordination.
How to navigate the surgical journey
A good way to think about perioperative care is to move through the journey in sequence: pre-op review, preparation, anesthesia, recovery, and follow-up. If you are early in that journey, the overview article in this section is the best place to begin.
From there, you can move into more specialized content in the preoperative, anesthesia, recovery, and nursing sections depending on the questions you are trying to answer.
Who may be involved
Depending on the procedure and setting, perioperative care may involve surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurse anesthetists, PACU nurses, perioperative nurses, hospitalists, internists, or other specialists. The exact mix depends on the patient and the facility.
This site uses the term in a patient-friendly way and does not assume that every reader needs the same level of technical detail. The goal is to create orientation, not overwhelm.
Think of perioperative care as a pathway
The most useful question is often not just “What happens during surgery?” but “What happens before, during, and after surgery, and who helps with each stage?”
Featured guides in this section
What Is Perioperative Medicine?
A foundational guide to the concept of perioperative medicine and coordinated surgical care.
Read guide →Preoperative Care
Learn how evaluation and preparation fit into the perioperative pathway.
Read guide →Anesthesia
Understand how anesthesia planning fits into the surgical journey.
Read guide →Recovery
See how early recovery continues the perioperative process.
Read guide →Helpful organizations and references
- Centre for Perioperative Care: https://www.cpoc.org.uk/about-cpoc/what-perioperative-care
- AHRQ: https://www.ahrq.gov/
- MedlinePlus: https://medlineplus.gov/