Patients can stay awake during surgery

1:59pm Thursday 7th August 2008

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DORSET County Hospital is leading the way in a new technology that means patients can stay awake during their operations.

The procedure is called ultrasound guided regional anaesthesia and is only being used at about six other hospitals in the country.

Dorset County Hospital is now acting as a national and international training centre for the technique, which can be used on operations to hands, arms, shoulders and feet.

It involves using high-quality ultrasound to guide anaesthetic to a very precise area of the body.

The system means general anaesthetic does not need to be used and procedures that once took several days can now take just hours. Hospital anaesthetist Duncan Farquhar-Thomson said the system was helping to free up hospital beds in Dorchester.

Last year some 200 patients were anaesthetised in this way and anaesthetists from across the country are visiting Dorchester to learn more about it.

Dr Farquhar-Thomson said: "It is exciting because Dorset County Hospital is leading the field in this technique.

"We have been one of the first hospitals to use this and we teach the technique nationally and internationally.

"Staff like it because the patients like it and it is extremely cost-effective. So far it has been very successful.

"An awful lot of patients can now have surgery as a day case rather than having to be in hospital for several days and it provides patients with much better pain relief after surgery too."

He added: "There have been a number of patients we have operated on who otherwise wouldn't be able to have their surgery because of serious medical problems which meant general anaesthetic would have been too dangerous."

Ultrasound guided regional anaesthesia is expected to become more widely available in NHS hospitals in future.