Each year, more than four million Australians and New Zealanders will have an anaesthetic. In fact, most people will need the care of an anaesthetist at some stage in their lives – for pain relief during the birth of a baby, for a routine day-stay procedure or for a major operation requiring complex, split-second decisions that keep patients alive. Many of today’s operations, especially for the very young, very old or very ill would not be feasible without modern anaesthesia. We've created this information to help you feel more relaxed about having surgery under anaesthesia.
One in five people in Australia and New Zealand will experience chronic – or persistent – pain at some stage in their lives. Established in 1998, the Faculty of Pain Medicine (FPM) has trained hundreds of specialist pain medicine physicians. These specialist pain medicine physicians also treat acute pain (post operative, post-trauma, acute episodes of pain in "medical conditions") and cancer pain (pain directly due to tumour invasion or compression, pain related to diagnostic or therapeutic procedures, pain due to cancer treatment).
Perioperative medicine emphasises the importance of an integrated, planned, and personalised approach to patient care before, during, and after any surgical procedure involving anaesthesia. The goal is to improve the patient experience and outcomes, lower the occurrence of postoperative issues, decrease the number of days spent in the hospital, and minimize readmissions after surgery. We call this approach a "perioperative care model".
