What areas of surgery can regional anaesthesia be used for?

I'm quite often asked about what areas of surgery regional anesthesia could make the biggest difference to and my answer to that would be the regional anesthesia also provides prolonged pain relief what we doctors would call analgesia and using it judiciously you can make some operations for which patients traditionally had to stay in hospital for several days you can make day case operation. So look at a partial knee replacement. Traditionally that patient would be in two or three days. If you use good approach to regional anesthesia, use some sedation if the patient's comfortable, that patient can be in and out in the same day safely. Now that starts to make a very big difference to the number of operations that you can offer to people, which means that you can be not only more efficient, you can be more effective and we believe provide better outcomes for the patient. So in a situation where we have a lot of people waiting on a waiting list to have their operations done, regional anesthesia does offer the opportunity for that more efficient and effective care while at the same time improving patient outcome and I think that sort of area is going to be the one where regional anesthesia will grow because it benefits not only the patients but the health service as well.