By Tom Heaton

After a longer than expected gap, welcome back to the second part of our quick look through the recent guidance from the Society for Ambulatory Anesthesia on the management of post-operative nausea and vomiting (PONV). In the first post we had a quick look at some of the risk factors for PONV, particularly looking at the weighting of different factors. As a follow up, this post looks at the next components of the guidelines where the authors look at the evidence of different interventions for reducing the incidence of PONV.

By Tom Heaton

For some time now I have been meaning to have a good look at what the evidence is around the management of post-op nausea and vomiting (PONV). As a particularly unpleasant side effect of what we do, it also seems to me to be a bit more of an unpredictable one. Different clinicians I have worked with have put different weight on the numerous risk factors and adjusted the prophylactic antiemetic choices accordingly, with practice ranging from zero to triple agent prophylaxis. Whilst aware of the different risk factors, I hadn't heard much about calculating the contribution that these factors make, and thus how to use them to make a more supported decision. The recent publication of the ‘Consensus Guidelines for the Management of Postoperative Nausea and Vomiting’ was therefore just what I was looking for. Published in Anesthesia & Analgesia in Jan 2014, the guidance was put together by the Society for Ambulatory Anesthesiology and is well worth a read if you haven’t yet had the chance. The aim of this post was to have a look at a few of the keys points in the document and try and summarise them.

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.