Medication Advice

Advice and Information about medicines for patients having surgery

Welcome to the medicines advice section of the Cardiff and Vale UHB Pre-Operative Assessment Clinic (POAC) website.  When you have an operation or procedure, your medicines will need to be reviewed by your surgeon, POAC nurse, and/or pharmacist and/or anaesthetist.  Some medicines need to be stopped in the days leading up to planned surgery to reduce the risk of complications, and you may risk your surgery being cancelled if you do not follow the advice given to you. If there are any changes since we last saw you it is really important that you inform us (contact numbers below).

You will be given verbal and written advice about particular medications that need to be adjusted or withheld from POAC. However, we understand you are given a lot of information during your assessment and you may be waiting weeks or months for a date for your surgery, so we have included some key information on this page!  The guide below covers some main groups of medicines and indicates what should be stopped, adjusted or continued leading up to the day of surgery using a traffic light system.

If you are on any of the following medicines you will receive instructions regarding these:

If you are diabetic, you will receive separate written instructions from your POAC team about how your tablets, insulin, and other injections are managed around the time of your operation. Please also see the Diabetes pages on this website.

If there are any changes to your medications or you have any questions please contact your POAC clinic:

UHW: 02920 744775   UHL: 02927 166163

POAC Pharmacists: 02921 840964