Guest editors:
Athanasios Chalkias, University of Thessaly, School of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Anesthesiology, Larisa, Greece
Vladimir Cerny, Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative Medicine and Intensive Care, J.E. Purkinje University, Masaryk Hospital, Usti nad Labem, Czech Republic; Department of Anesthesia, Pain Management and Perioperative Medicine, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
Anesthesiology has greatly evolved during the past decade, changing from a specialty consisting of taking care of patients in the operating room to a specialty that requires expertise in all aspects of perioperative medicine. This is most important for emergency cases, which represent a significant proportion of the surgical operations worldwide. Nevertheless, emergency surgery in critically ill patients continues to be associated with high rates of morbidity and mortality.
The nature of critical illness or injury and the significant costs required to treat these patients challenge both health care providers and health systems. The perioperative management of critically ill patients may be demanding due to the diminished physiological reserve and comorbidities, the systemic response to surgery, the administration of anesthetics, and/or the available resources. All these have significant implications on treatment strategy and optimal care necessitates a fully controlled environment with optimally trained and motivated personnel.
Acute Care Anesthesiology focuses on the perioperative management of extremely critically ill patients and the early provision of individualized, goal-directed perioperative treatment. The preoperative period begins with the alert of the acute care anesthesiologist who provides expert individualized vital function support in the Emergency Department or the Ward, aiming at an ideal preoperative management and determining when the patient is optimized for surgery. Then, the individualized resuscitation efforts continue in the Operating Room, addressing the unique needs of the patient and managing any unpredictable events. After the end of emergency surgery, the acute care anesthesiologist is the most suitable individual for providing early postoperative critical care due to the familiarization with the patient's physiological status and his/her response to treatment.
In order to explore the interests of our audience, and to make our colleagues in the field aware, BMC Anesthesiology is pleased to launch a thematic series dedicated to Acute Care Anesthesiology. The principle motivation of this series is to further expand the role of anesthesiologist into the state-of-the-art perioperative resuscitation. We especially welcome submissions from centres or individuals whose findings have the potential to significantly improve the perioperative management of extremely critically ill patients. Topics include: i) preoperative management in the Emergency Department or the Ward and optimization of physiology for emergency/acute care surgery (e.g. emergency airway management, advanced cardiac life support, trauma resuscitation, permissive hypotension, pre-warming, lung-protective mechanical ventilation, etc..); ii) intraoperative resuscitation (fluid management, arrhythmias, multiple organ failure, invasive and non-invasive monitoring, lung-protective ventilation, massive transfusion, coagulation disorders, drugs, hemodynamics, microcirculation, temperature management, non-technical skills, etc.); iii) early and late postoperative critical care in the Postanesthesia Care Unit or the Intensive Care Unit, respectively. We hope that beyond the state-of-art, this thematic series will also stimulate high-quality research that will improve the perioperative management and resuscitation of extremely critically ill patients.
Please submit directly to BMC Anesthesiology, stating in your cover letter that it is for the “Acute Care Anesthesiology” thematic series. Alternatively, you can email your pre-submission queries to the Editor of BMC Anesthesiology at guangde.tu@biomedcentral.com