Tutorial of the Week: Awareness under Anaesthesia

Abstract

Anaesthetic awareness is a rare but potentially devastating complication of general anaesthesia. It may not be possible to prevent every case from happening, but it is possible to identify high risk cases and modify anaesthetic technique accordingly. For all other cases, prevention of awareness requires meticulous attention to detail to eliminate errors.

Whilst depth of anaesthesia monitors that process EEG signals may help to reduce the incidence of awareness, they are not widely used in this country and the evidence is still not conclusive. This does not mean that they are not useful but it may be that a strict protocol driven anaesthetic delivery may be as good.