No GA without Nerve Blocks

• “No GA without Nerve Blocks” by Dr. Thorsten Steinfeldt

Webinar Description

Multimodal Anaesthesia: Integrating Regional and General Anaesthesia

Modern anaesthesia should be understood as a perioperative strategy aimed at improving patient outcomes, recovery, and clinical efficiency rather than as the isolated administration of general anaesthesia. Multimodal anaesthesia combines general anaesthesia with peripheral regional anaesthetic techniques to provide procedure-specific, opioid-sparing analgesia and to reduce the overall pharmacological burden.

Compared with general anaesthesia alone, this approach can substantially reduce perioperative opioid requirements and opioid-related adverse effects, including sedation, respiratory depression, ileus, pruritus, and postoperative nausea and vomiting. Effective regional analgesia may also reduce the need for volatile anaesthetics and other systemic agents, thereby facilitating faster emergence, shorter recovery times, and improved postoperative vigilance. By attenuating nociceptive input, limiting opioid exposure, and supporting more stable perioperative physiology, regional anaesthesia may further contribute to a lower incidence of postoperative delirium.

Beyond these clinical benefits, multimodal anaesthesia can improve perioperative pathways, support early mobilisation, and optimise recovery room and ward resources. Whenever feasible and safe, general anaesthesia should therefore be complemented by appropriate regional anaesthetic techniques.