Adverse events in anaesthesia
Although principally a clinician at heart, research has to be at the heart of every academic – questioning is what we are about. In anaesthesia we are relatively lucky as many of the accepted clinical practices are based on opinion rather than scientific principles which means that there are many questions to answer. There is little information about adverse events under anasesthesia and this is one area that the anaesthesia service at Cambridge is trying to increase literature in by documenting the adverse events at this hospital. It is hoped to make this a multi-centre study and eventually a national one. Other areas of interest include examining recovery of horses to provide more data to the evidence base, the benefits of using lidocaine plasters for post operative pain relief, duration of epidural analgesia with the addition of alpha-2 agonists, the effect of obesity on dose requirements for induction of anaesthesia and the optimum dose of ketamine for short field anaesthesia in horses. There is also ongoing collaborative work with surgery and the Department of Engineering assessing respiratory function in small animals.