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Paediatric Perioperative Care (P-POC)
“Every child having a GA for a procedure/operation should expect to receive pre-operative assessment that meets the medical, physical and emotional needs of that child”.
The P-POC group was started in 2015 by a group of paediatric anaesthetists who recognised the importance of pre-assessment for children and perioperative medicine aimed at improving outcomes from surgery and anaesthesia.
There is a limited presence of standards in existing publications around perioperative medicine and preassessment in children. GPAS (RCOA, 2017) has one specific reference to this and also highlights perioperative medicine as one of the important areas of future research. There is very little published on perioperative care which could support the development of services in hospitals.
There is a lack of evidence to help advance perioperative medicine for children. There is a need to demonstrate benefit in a measurable form, beyond just cost savings and improved theatre list efficiency. The P-POC group hope to start projects looking at the broader aspects of paediatric perioperative care and also concentrate on some specific care pathways.