What’s on the Menu: Easy Decision Making for Anesthesia Protocols

Course Details

This lecture has been RACE Approved for 1 CE hour of continuing education credit for veterinarians.

Each practice should have a few anesthesia protocols in-house to use and utilize for patients. Determining which drugs to utilize, optimizing patient’s entry into anesthesia, pre-troubleshooting their problem list, and coordinating their anesthesia menu will be discussed. The key to successful anesthesia is identifying risk (Brodbelt Morbidity and mortality study 2009, 2010) and acting accordingly with readiness for surgery, drug selection, and finally management of the case intraoperatively. Risk analysis is the means whereby the practitioner and technician team decide whether a patient is healthy, unhealthy/ stable or unhealthy/unstable; assigning ASA risk class is a more in-depth form of this case identification; with this knowledge, the team is able to better stabilize and then choose anesthesia drugs accordingly. Although the drug choices are plentiful, the generalized scheme (menu) doesn’t change and basics can allow safe choices of agent, dose, and route. This presentation aims at teaching how to choose the drugs and gives options for protocols for low and high-risk patients.