Does regional anaesthesia improve outcomes?

Now the question is whether the use of regional anaesthesia improves the outcome. Is it better for you? Now there is increasingly clear evidence that the use of regional anaesthesia for appropriate procedures and it will only be used for an appropriate procedure in your circumstances can actually improve the outcome. Let me put it in a simple way. If you make a foot go numb for eight hours and you do a one hour operation on that foot for the next seven hours you're not having an operation and it doesn't hurt at all so that making a part of your body go numb for a few hours gives you really fantastic pain relief for that few hours after the operation. If you have good pain relief you don't have to have in that time strong painkillers and very often what's seen as the complications of general anaesthesia are actually more accurately the complications of strong painkillers. So if we take a strong painkiller that's really commonly used in anaesthesia and in surgery, morphine. Morphine sedates you, makes you feel sleepy for really quite a long time. Morphine makes you feel nauseous and if you're not given morphine, your chances of feeling nauseous, your chances of vomiting are quite substantially decreased. Morphine makes you itch so that you have to scratch yourself. Morphine makes it difficult to pass urine. This is particularly relevant for men in, how can I put it tactfully, their middle years where give them some morphine. A lot of men find it really difficult to pee. Morphine constipates you. It bungs you up like a cork as do all the morphine-like drugs. So by avoiding these strong painkillers by providing you with really good pain relief we can minimise the complications associated with the use of pain relief and the use of general anaesthesia. General anaesthesia in itself is also associated with the production of post-operative after surgery nausea and vomiting. We can show definitively that by using regional anaesthesia we can give patients a better experienced we think during, we can prove after the operation and they're more likely to get home on the same day of surgery and be returned to their own normal natural environments at home rather than risk being kept in the hospital overnight because of a complication related to the pain relief, the surgery or the anaesthesia.