The role of regional anesthesia in patient outcome: ambulatory surgery

The past 10 years have demonstrated real and dramatic growth in the number and complexity of ambulatory surgeries. The remaining real problems are the postoperative pain and the adverse effects due to systemic opioids promoting hospital readmissions and increasing costs. These events limit the expansion of outpatient surgery. Regional anesthesia techniques such as spinal anesthesia and peripheral nerve blocks are ideal techniques for 1-day hospital admission surgical procedures. It is now fully demonstrated that these techniques allow rapid and complete anesthetic blocks, a limitation of adverse events and unplanned hospital admissions, and increase the quality of postoperative pain relief and patient's outcome if continuous peripheral nerve blocks are used.