Robust procedures should be in place to report and investigate adverse incidents involving equipment, staff or patients. The published outcomes of these investigations should be disseminated to all relevant anaesthetists and others.
Booklets providing information for patients about their stay in hospital should be available for all patients. This will include the patient information booklets published by the British Heart Foundation on cardiac disease, prevention, treatment and lifestyle modification, and those by the British Thoracic Society on lung disease and the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation for information about lung cancer and...
Information about cardiac rehabilitation generally, and information regarding the availability of such courses locally, should also be available.
Information on specific individual risks of invasive monitoring, e.g. risk of injury due to arterial and central venous lines, should be available to patients.
All cardiothoracic units should provide patient information about preoperative smoking cessation, including how to access local services to support patients wishing to quit before their operation.
Whenever possible, escalation in care should ideally not lead to the separation of mother and baby.
A multidisciplinary team should agree and document plans for the peripartum management of patients with known congenital or acquired cardiac disease in advance. Staff and facilities should be available for monitored or operative delivery, and for managing acute decompensation.
Additional specialised equipment is necessary and should be available for every morbidly obese patient at all stages of the pathway. Advance warning of these elective patients should be given to the appropriate department in the hospital by the preoperative assessment team.35
section 2
chapter 1 recommentsation 1
italics
