A Consultant Anaesthetist, Dr Seyi Oyesola, says that over 90 per cent of successful surgical operations depend on inputs and services from anaesthetic medicine.
Oyesola, the Chief Executive Officer of Anaesthesia and Critical Care Consultants (A3C), said this during a visit by the anaesthesia team to the News Agency of Nigeria in Lagos.
Anaesthesia is a state of controlled, temporary loss of sensation or awareness that is induced for medical purposes.
An anaesthetic is a drug or agent that produces a complete or partial loss of feeling.
Oyesola said that anaesthetics and critical intensive care units played vital roles in preoperative care evaluations to aid medical surgery procedures and operations.
He explained that preoperative evaluations comprised all the medical services given to a patient before, during, and after a surgical operation, which would pave the way for the success of the surgery.
He added that the three major components of anaesthetic services included reversible sleep, mobility of the patient, and pain relief.
The consultant emphasised that it was the anaesthetist that puts the patient to sleep for the surgical operation to take place and wakes him/her up after the surgery.
Oyesola noted that an anaesthetist also provides others postoperative care in the intensive care unit; which involves constant observation and monitoring of the patient for the next three when he/she would be fit.
He said that too much anaesthesia could be dangerous as it could make a patient come out of surgery with brain damage, saying that made it pertinent for anaesthetic services to be rendered by only qualified anaesthetic professionals.
According to him, doctors rely on the services of anaesthetists and intensive care units to arrive at successful medical procedures and treatments.
“More than 90 per cent of patients with successful surgical operations are managed based on anaesthetic medicine.
“In this era of modern medicine, anaesthetic professionals play a foremost role in ensuring that medical procedures and surgeries are successfully carried out.
“It is the role of an anaesthetic scientist to provide the conducive atmosphere for surgery to take place; which includes putting the patient to a reversible sleep, ensuring the patient is alive and mobile during the surgical procedure and waking him/her up after the surgery.
“The instances where a patient dies during or after surgery can be as a result of wrong administration of anaesthetics.
“Therefore, anaesthetics services must be handled by qualified anaesthetists or intensive care clinicians,” Oyesola said.
Speaking, the Commercial Director of A3C, Mr Akintunde Sawyerr, decried the lack of awareness and poor recognition of anaesthetic medicine all over the world and particularly in Nigeria.
Sawyerr said that anaesthesia was particularly underserved everywhere in the world as there was no single medical school in the whole of West Africa that trains personnel in intensive critical care.
He, therefore, called for massive awareness and public education on the roles and importance of anaesthesia medicine to human health.
“Anaesthesia or critical intensive care as a speciality of medicine has not been given the right recognition.
“A lot of people do not know that speciality of medicine exists or the role it plays in surgical procedures.
“But the truth is that without anaesthesia or intensive care unit, there will be no successful surgery as a greater percentage of medical operations depend on anaesthesia.
“Unfortunately, many health facilities do not have qualified anaesthetists or proper intensive care units where patients should be kept after surgery for constant observation and monitoring,” Sawyerr said.
(NAN)
