Surgical management of inflammatory bowel disease

Inflammatory bowel disease includes ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn’s disease (CD), the management of both being medical in the first instance. Surgery for UC and CD is undertaken for failure of medical management or complications of the disease or from therapy there of. It is important that these patients are managed jointly by multidisciplinary teams including medical gastroenterologists, surgeons, radiologists, pathologists and specialist nurses.We discuss the surgical management options for UC and CD in this article.