How regional anaesthesia can help during the Covid-19 pandemic

So a lot of people are getting very interested in extending the use of regional anaesthesia right now while we have a problem with COVID-19. As you know, waiting lists have increased substantially because we were unable to do planned surgery in the early part of 2020 and there have been a huge extra number of people waiting for their operations. Now because using regional anaesthetic you are not performing aerosol generating procedures, it is much more efficient to do procedures under regional anaesthesia than under general anaesthesia right now in accordance with the guidance provided by Public Health England, which means that if you can get your day case procedures done under almost exclusively local anaesthesia, you can have a much higher output of cases and perform them just as safely. And therefore NHS London and other NHS areas in the UK have been looking at developing a programme whereby local and regional anaesthesia is the default for many, many, many day case procedures and they've calculated that doing it this way will allow us to eat into that waiting list, get a lot more patients to have their operations done quickly and successfully as a result.