• Anaesth Intensive Care · Feb 2025

    Improving the efficiency of sevoflurane delivery during general anaesthesia by educating and motivating anaesthetists to utilise the Volatile Efficiency Ratio.

    • Samuel T Costello, Blake J Vorias, and Roman Kluger.
    • Department of Anaesthesia and Acute Pain Medicine, St Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
    • Anaesth Intensive Care. 2025 Feb 13: 310057X241296574310057X241296574.

    AbstractVolatile anaesthetic agents such as sevoflurane contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, and selecting low fresh gas flows on anaesthetic machines minimises their waste. Facilitating improvements in sevoflurane use requires the education, motivation, and standardised evaluation of anaesthetists. There is currently no standard of practice related to the efficiency of anaesthetic gas delivery per case. We conducted a multi-component study termed 'Low With The Flow' (LWTF) to directly address these requirements by educating and motivating anaesthetists to reduce fresh gas flow and thereby sevoflurane use. We introduced a novel metric, the 'volatile efficiency ratio' (VER), able to be calculated on Draeger Primus™, the Draeger Atlan™ family and Draeger Perseus A500™ machines, to audit sevoflurane use in a case-by-case fashion, and assess whether the intervention could achieve a set VER target. The LWTF intervention significantly improved the efficiency of sevoflurane delivery (VER 0.46 pre-intervention (n = 518) versus VER 0.57 post-intervention (n = 531), 95% confidence interval 0.092 to 0.129, P < 0.0001) resulting in a calculated average of 1.3 kg carbon dioxide equivalent emissions reduction and approximately AUD 3.50 saving per case. Consequently, the financial and environmental outcomes from sevoflurane delivery were considerably reduced. Our LWTF intervention provides a valuable model for other anaesthetic departments to investigate and address the global environmental and financial burdens related to their volatile anaesthetic use. For anaesthetists using anaesthesia machines that do not facilitate calculation of VER, an approach using components of our LWTF intervention may still reduce the environmental and financial impacts associated with administration of volatile anaesthesia.

      Pubmed     Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…