LAUSR

Diabetes mellitus is a disease of endemic proportions, with an in-hospital prevalence up to 15%. Considering this prevalence we expected Dutch hospitals to have a protocol in place for the treatment of diabetes mellitus in the peri-operative period. As hyperglycaemia and diabetes mellitus are associated with postoperative complications, we set out to evaluate these protocols. We surveyed all Dutch hospitals, hypothesising that these protocols would show considerable variability, reflecting the diverse literature on this topic. Between July 2016 and January 2017, we contacted the anaesthesia department of every public hospital in the Netherlands by phone and (e-)mail to request their peri-operative treatment protocol for patients with diabetes mellitus. In addition, we sent out a survey to gather information on pre-operative preparation, diabetes medication management, glucose measurements and glucose targets, potassium co-administration and blood sugar controlstrategies. We used a standardised data collection sheet and entered all data in GraphPad Prism 7 (GraphPad Software, La Jolla, California, USA) for graphical representation of our results. We summarised all information in a nonidentifiable database. Our questionnaire, database, results and additional analyses are available upon request from the authors.