By Tom Heaton

Following on from last week's post on the peri-operative management of elderly patients, I thought I would continue down a similar vein by having a look at the recent Anaesthesia article on the holy trinity (big three) of emergency surgery: abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA), laparotomies and hip fractures. Whilst looking at these presentations in particular, the nature of the article focuses on the elderly patient with these conditions, which is understandable when you consider that it is this population in which they are most commonly seen. Given the three part nature of the article and the depth of each topic, I though it would be preferable to break it down into three different posts and keep the length of them a bit more bite-sized, starting with the ruptured AAA. If you haven’t seen the article yet yourself, it was published in the Anaesthesia supplement at the end of last year, and you can get to it through the link below:

By Tom Heaton

Having finally got round to reading the latest AAGBI (Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland) guidelines, I thought they would be a great focus for the latest blog post, mainly due to (I feel) their huge relevance. A copy of the document itself is available to download below (freely distributable under one of the great Creative Commons licenses – yay!) if you haven’t had a look at it yourself yet.

By Tom Heaton

Well a Happy New Year to you all! Despite the length of time since the last post I hope that this latest offering represents the start of a busy 2014 from Rapid Sequence. To make up for lost time I thought that a suitably divisive topic would be the best choice to get some lively debate going. After careful consideration of a wide range of options (there seem to be plenty to choose from - more coming soon I hope), I was prompted by the recent British Journal of Anaesthesia (BJA) review article to delve into the fogs of nitrous oxide use. As the leading review in a prominent journal, I thought dissecting it would be a great springboard to a discussion about the evidence that is out there.