Quality improvement initiative: how the setting up of an anaesthesia consultant-led perioperative outreach service addressed anaesthesia-specific issues to improve anaesthesia consult and surgery timings for hip fracture patients.

BACKGROUND: Surgery is recommended within 48 hours of hip fractures for better perioperative outcomes. Yet, such targets still commonly remain a challenge. Our institution is no exception.As part of a hospital-wide initiative, our anaesthesia department focused on improving perioperative processes with aims to reduce the time to first anaesthesia consult and surgery for hip fracture patients. Acknowledging multiple causes for surgical delay, we decided first to address anaesthesia-specific factors-(a) first anaesthetist contact usually happens after surgery is offered which leaves a short runway for preoptimisation, (b) this is compounded by varying degrees of anaesthetist involvement for follow-up thereafter. (c) There is a need to calibrate our perioperative care standards and (d) enforce more consistent auditing in quality assurance. This project was conducted in a 1000-bed hospital serving eastern Singapore. INTERVENTION: We created an integrated anaesthesia consultant-led outreach service for hip fracture patients, based on a perioperative workflow system to provide proactive anaesthetist consults within 24 hours of admission in advance of surgical decision. This was streamlined with a coordinated follow-up system for preoptimisation until surgery. METHODS: Our quality improvement project applied the iterative Plan-Do-Study-Act model from pilot to sustainability stage. We collected data at baseline followed by 6-monthly audits from electronic databases.Primary outcomes measured were time to first anaesthesia consult and surgery. Secondary outcomes included rate of critical care reviews and admission, mortality rate, length of stay and time to nerve blocks. RESULTS: Post implementation, our service reviewed >600 hip fracture patients. Median time to anaesthesia consult reduced significantly from 35.3 hours (2019) to 21.5 hours (2021) (p=0.029). Median time to surgery was reduced from 61.5 hours (2019) to 50 hours (2021) (p=0.897) with a 13.6% increase in patients operated <48 hours. Critical care admissions, 6-monthly and 12-monthly mortality rates and time to nerve block were reduced with a greater percentage of patients discharged within 10 days. CONCLUSION: Our project focused on improving anaesthesia perioperative processes to address surgical delays in hip fracture patients. Our consultant-led anaesthesia service ensured that proactive anaesthesia care was delivered to provide sufficient time for preoptimisation with greater standardisation to follow-up, better communication and quality assurance.

A randomised controlled trial comparing adductor canal block and femoral nerve block for knee arthroplasty.

INTRODUCTION: Adductor canal block (ACB) is hypothesised to provide superior analgesia to femoral nerve block (FNB) for total knee arthroplasty (TKA) while preserving quadriceps strength. METHODS: 30 patients undergoing TKA were randomised to receive either ACB or FNB. Baseline tests of quadriceps strength were performed. Ultrasound-guided blocks with 30 mL of 0.5% ropivacaine were administered before induction of general anaesthesia. Patient-controlled analgesia (morphine) was prescribed for postoperative analgesia. The primary outcome of this prospective, double-blinded, randomised controlled trial was morphine consumption (mean ± standard deviation) in the first 24 hours. Secondary outcomes were pain scores using a numeric rating scale (median and interquartile range [IQR]), quadriceps strength (% of baseline) and functional outcomes at 24 hours and 48 hours postoperatively. RESULTS: There was no statistically significant difference in morphine consumption at 24 hours between the ACB and FNB groups (21 ± 11 mg vs. 20 ± 12 mg; p = 0.85). No statistically significant differences were observed between the ACB and FNB groups in pain scores at 24 hours (at rest: 0 [IQR 0-2] vs. 0 [IQR 0-2]; on movement: 5 [IQR 4-8] vs. 5 [IQR 3-8]) and quadriceps strength (24 hours: 28.8% ± 26.1% vs. 26.8% ± 19.6% of baseline; 48 hours: 31.5 ± 23.1% vs. 33.7% ± 20.1% of baseline). There were also no statistically significant differences in functional outcomes and length of stay. CONCLUSION: We found no statistically significant differences in analgesic effects, quadriceps strength or functional recovery postoperatively between ACB and FNB.