When can regional anaesthesia be used?

The question that I'm often asked is what parts of the body are particularly amenable to regional anaesthesia and what operations in regional anaesthesia are likely to have the biggest impact Well we are a little bit limited in regional anaesthesia, there are some bits of the body we can't do We're not very good at doing inside the head, inside the chest and inside the upper abdomen But if it's lower abdomen, if it's the surface of the neck, if it's the arms or the legs and that's very much amenable to regional anaesthesia and the substantial majority of cases in those parts of the body can be done under a form of regional anaesthesia. Now, don't think for a moment that if you have a regional anaesthetic for an operation in those parts of your body that we're going to leave you stone cold sober, absolutely wide awake unless you really want to because used with judicious amounts of sedation, a patient even undergoing major and long surgery can be remarkably relaxed and have an excellent experience of original hand setting which can offer them other advantages in terms of their overall recovery from that operation.