TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--For the second year in a row, dedicated ERAS Cardiac and Thoracic Surgery sessions will be held at the American Association for Thoracic Surgery 99th Annual meeting on May 4-7 in Toronto, Canada.
There will be eight sessions dedicated to ERAS/perioperative medicine. These will include presentations by the lead author of the ERAS® Society Thoracic Guidelines, Dr. Tim Batchelor, Department of Thoracic Surgery, University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust, Bristol, UK; as well as the ERAS® Cardiac Guidelines by Dr. Daniel Engelman, University of Massachusetts-Baystate, Springfield, MA, USA. The sessions will include 17 selected high-quality peer-reviewed abstracts and separate sessions dedicated to preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative interventions to optimize the care of both cardiac and thoracic surgical patients.
Some of the standardized approaches discussed will include: prehabilitation to help more fragile patients prepare for surgery; pathways to better manage glucose, fluids; promotion of early extubation; new techniques for rigid fixation of the sternum; active clearance methods for chest tubes to prevent retained blood syndrome; use of biomarkers to prevent acute kidney injury; goal directed fluid therapy; and novel approaches to reduce postoperative delirium. There will also be a session dedicated to best-practice approaches to addressing the opioid crisis for cardiothoracic surgeons and their multidisciplinary teams. Another session will summarize “The Year in Review: The Very Best of the CT Perioperative Publications.” A final session will look at what to do when a patient “falls off the ERAS pathway,” exploring complex critical care interventions and controversies in the specialty.
The ERAS/Perioperative planning committee, which includes Drs. Glenn Whitman (Johns Hopkins), Daniel Engelman (University of Massachusetts-Baystate), Blair Marshall (Georgetown University), Jennifer Lawton (Johns Hopkins), Rakesh C. Arora (University of Manitoba) and Robin Varghese (Mount Sinai, NY), invited select members of the multidisciplinary cardiac care teams to present during these sessions.
“We believe this is an important step toward closer collaboration and standardization of best practice among our anesthesia, critical care, perfusion, pharmacy, nursing and advanced practitioner partners,” said Dr. Engelman, President of ERAS® Cardiac.
ERAS® Cardiac is a non-profit organization with the mission to develop evidence-based expert consensus statements promoting best practice recovery practices. The goal is to provide hospitals better guidance for developing local protocols that are part of a continuous quality improvement (CQI) process for better patient care and a reduction of postoperative complications and costs after cardiothoracic surgery (www.erascardiac.org). Focusing on cardiac surgery, our organization is collaborating with ERAS® (www.erassociety.org), an organization that promotes enhanced recovery in many other surgical specialties worldwide. Contact Alex Gregory, MD: Alex.Gregory@albertahealthservices.ca
The ERAS® Society (www.erassociety.org) is an international, non-profit, multi-professional and multi-disciplinary medical society registered in Sweden devoted to the improvement of perioperative care, most commonly referred to as “Enhanced Recovery After Surgery" or "ERAS." The ERAS® Society is comprised of leaders and developers of care for patients undergoing surgery in a large range of surgical specialties. The ERAS® Study Group and later the ERAS® Society was assembled by Professor Ken Fearon, University of Edinburgh, UK and Professor Olle Ljungqvist, Karolinska Institute, Sweden in 2001.