21th Century Perioperative Surgical Care: Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS)
Enhanced recovery After Surgery (ERAS) is a multimodal evidence-based program of multidisciplinary perioperative surgical care. The goal of ERAS is to accelerate the recovery of surgical patients while decreasing complications and reducing hospital length of stay. Enhanced recovery after surgery is the 21th century perioperative surgical care model. In the United Kingdom, ERAS protocols are adapted as standard management of perioperative care.
The underlying principle of ERAS is to enable patients to recover from surgery and leave hospital sooner by minimizing the stress responses on the body during surgery.
It is essential that the patient is in the best possible preoperative condition for surgery, receives the best possible intraoperative management, experiences the best post-operative recovery.
ERAS replaced the traditional perioperative surgical care with evidence-based best practices. ERAS is comprehensive in covering all areas of patient's journey through the whole surgical process (surgeon office, preadmission testing, preop, intraop, postop, post discharge). ERAS provides guidance to all involved in patient centered perioperative care, and helps them to work as a well-coordinated team to provide the best care.
Key elements of ERAS include: preoperative patient education, reduction of preoperative fasting, omission of bowel preparation, goal-directed fluid management, reduction in perioperative use of nasogastric tubes and drains, early removal of Foley catheters, multimodal analgesia to minimize opiate consumption, early postoperative mobilization, and early oral nutrition.
It has already been shown to benefit patients undergoing colorectal, urological, gynecological, orthopedic, and vascular surgery. A growing body of evidence including randomized controlled trials has shown that ERAS speeds recovery, reduced length of stay by more than 30%, reduced postoperative complications by up to 50% (1), reduces cost while maintaining patient satisfaction and quality of life.
ERAS is the best perioperative surgical care model, because ERAS can achieve result on three dimensions of the Triple Aim: better health care, better patient experience, and lower cost.
(1) Varandhan, KK et al. Clin. Nutr 2010
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