Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) in Corbin, Kentucky

Baptist Health Corbin: Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS)

Enhanced recovery after surgery (or ERAS) treatment protocol can lead to less post-op pain and quicker recovery timelines. Learn about ERAS from Baptist Health.

Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) in Corbin, Kentucky HealthTalks Transcript

Aaron House, MD, General Surgery:
Enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) is a real culture change in surgery to benefit you, the patient. It consists of multiple levels of care and multiple interventions to minimize the stress of surgery, which aids in providing you with an experience that leads to less post-operative pain, a shorter stay in the hospital, and allows us to have you recover in a much more efficient and timely fashion, so you can return to your normal activity after a surgery.

We do things preoperatively as far as your education and some of the preoperative measures to prevent infection, like how you clean your body the night before surgery, which will aid in minimizing your risk of complications.

Prior to surgery, in the preoperative holding area, we’re giving preoperative, nonnarcotic medications to stimulate the body to have less of a pain response to our surgeries.

During surgery, we are utilizing minimally invasive techniques to minimize the trauma to the body. Anesthesia is an integral part of the process in providing nerve blocks.

The other goal of ERAS protocol is to provide multiple forms of post-operative pain control, primarily relying on anti-inflammatory therapy rather than narcotic therapy. The ERAS protocols provide us the ability to limit narcotic use and need where traditionally it was encouraged as a part of a pain-free recovery, which led to larger problems for patients who would have never become addicted to opioids, while still improving the overall quality of your post-operative recovery period.