Anesthesia and analgesia
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Anesthesia and analgesia · Oct 2020
Association of Anesthesiologist Handovers With Short-Term Outcomes for Patients Undergoing Cardiac Surgery.
Complete handover of anesthesia care to a second anesthesiologist has been demonstrated to be associated with worse short-term adverse outcomes among cardiac surgery patients, but little information from multi-institutional studies is available. ⋯ Cardiac surgery patients in New York who had complete anesthesia handovers experienced higher short-term mortality rates, but there were no meaningful differences in other outcomes. Unnecessary handovers should be carefully monitored.
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Anesthesia and analgesia · Oct 2020
Anesthesia for Maternal-Fetal Interventions: A Consensus Statement From the American Society of Anesthesiologists Committees on Obstetric and Pediatric Anesthesiology and the North American Fetal Therapy Network.
Maternal-fetal surgery is a rapidly evolving specialty, and significant progress has been made over the last 3 decades. A wide range of maternal-fetal interventions are being performed at different stages of pregnancy across multiple fetal therapy centers worldwide, and the anesthetic technique has evolved over the years. The American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) recognizes the important role of the anesthesiologist in the multidisciplinary approach to these maternal-fetal interventions and convened a collaborative workgroup with representatives from the ASA Committees of Obstetric and Pediatric Anesthesia and the Board of Directors of the North American Fetal Therapy Network. This consensus statement describes the comprehensive preoperative evaluation, intraoperative anesthetic management, and postoperative care for the different types of maternal-fetal interventions.
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Anesthesia and analgesia · Oct 2020
Comparison of Percentage Prolonged Times to Tracheal Extubation Between a Japanese Teaching Hospital and One in the United States, Without and With a Phase I Postanesthesia Care Unit.
Prolonged times to tracheal extubation are those from end of surgery (dressing on the patient) to extubation 15 minutes or longer. They are so long that others in the operating room (OR) generally have exhausted whatever activities can be done. They cause delays in the starts of surgeons' to-follow cases and are associated with longer duration workdays. Anesthesiologists rate them as being inferior quality. We compare prolonged times to extubation between a teaching hospital in the United States with a phase I postanesthesia care unit (PACU) and a teaching hospital in Japan without a PACU. Our report is especially important during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Anesthesiologists with some patients undergoing general anesthetics and having initial PACU recovery in the ORs where they had surgery can learn from the Japanese anesthesiologists with all patients recovering in ORs. ⋯ Differences in anesthetic practice can facilitate major differences in patient recovery soon after anesthesia, useful when the patient will recover initially in the OR or if the phase I PACU is expected to be unable to admit the patient.
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Anesthesia and analgesia · Oct 2020
Blood Pressure Management by Anesthesia Professionals: Evaluating Clinician Skill From Electronic Medical Records.
Avoiding intraoperative hypotension might serve as a measure of clinician skill. We, therefore, estimated the range of hypotension in patients of nurse anesthetists, and whether observed differences were associated with a composite of serious complications. ⋯ Hypotension is associated with complications on a case basis. But the average amount of hypotension for nurse anesthetists over hundreds of cases differed only slightly and was insufficient to explain meaningful differences in complications. Avoiding hypotension is a worthy clinical goal, but does not appear to be a useful metric of performance because the range of average amounts per clinician is not meaningfully associated with patient outcomes, at least among nurse anesthetists in 1 tertiary center.