Current opinion in anaesthesiology
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Curr Opin Anaesthesiol · Dec 2016
ReviewDay surgery regional anesthesia in children: safety and improving outcomes, do they make a difference?
The objective of this review is to provide an overview of recent developments in pediatric regional anesthesia and elucidate outcomes as it relates to patient safety and overall satisfaction. ⋯ Despite the limited number of randomized controlled trials evaluating the safety of individual regional anesthetic techniques, the growing body of data, such as presented in the Pediatric Regional Anesthesia Network database, suggests a high degree of safety in performing various regional anesthetic modalities. Modern medicine should continue to embrace the use of regional anesthesia, particularly in the ambulatory setting, to reduce perioperative pain and improve patient outcomes.
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Perioperative prediction models can help to improve personalized patient care by providing individual risk predictions to both patients and providers. However, the scientific literature on prediction model development and validation can be quite technical and challenging to understand. This article aims to provide the necessary insight for clinicians to assess the value of a prediction model that they intend to use in their clinical practice. ⋯ Clinicians can assess the value of a prediction model for their practice by first identifying what the usage of the model will be. Second, they can recognize which performance characteristics are relevant to their assessment of the model. Finally, they need to decide whether the available scientific evidence sufficiently matches their clinical practice to proceed with implementation.
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Needle-based and cannula-based eye blocks are 'blind' techniques prone to rare but serious complications. Ultrasound, an established adjunct for peripheral nerve block, may be beneficial for ophthalmic anesthesia application. The present review details the evolution of ultrasound-guided eye blocks, outlines safety issues, and reviews recent studies and editorial opinions. ⋯ Ultrasound-guided ophthalmic regional anesthesia is evolving beyond simple visualization of the anatomy. Recent research emphasizes the imprecision of needle tip location without ultrasound and the key role of imaging local anesthetic dispersion. There is ongoing debate in the literature regarding the utility of routine ultrasound for eye blocks.
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Mentoring is fundamentally valuable and important to students considering a path into our specialty, as well as to colleagues already in it and with ambition to advance. General principles and personal experiences are collected and described to help inform future mentors and to reinforce the value of having a mentor and the satisfaction (and work) that is associated with such a role. ⋯ Access to a mentor is an often-cited key to choosing a specialty and the success of junior colleagues and thus the entire department. Mentoring is fundamentally valuable in providing role modeling and also in protecting the mentee from the inefficiency of learning lessons the hard way.
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The purpose of this article is to provide a structural and functional understanding of the systems used for the regulation of medical devices in the USA and European Union (EU). ⋯ The US and EU medical device regulatory systems are similar in many ways, but differ in important ways too, which impacts the afforded level of safety and effectiveness assurance. In both systems, medical devices are classified and regulated on a risk basis, which fundamentally differs from drug regulation, where uniform requirements are imposed. Anesthesia providers must gain knowledge of these systems and be active players in both premarket and postmarket activities, particularly with regard to vigilance and adverse event/device failure reporting.