Preoperative and Postoperative Assessment for General Anaesthesia course for Dental Practice

This session discusses factors governing fitness for general anaesthesia, including pre- and postoperative assessment of patients.

Learning objectives

By the end of this session you will be able to:

• describe how a patient should be optimised prior to general anaesthesia
• list the steps required for a thorough preoperative assessment
• list the key checks to be completed during the postoperative period

The busy dental practice deals with thousands of patients in a year. It is inevitable that a proportion of them will require care under general anaesthesia (GA). This may be because of disease complexity, for example, impacted teeth, soft tissue disease, orthognathic, even tumour-related events but, also very commonly for anxiety-related issues.