Educational Perspectives: Anesthesia 101: What the Neonatologist Needs to Know About Anesthesiology

As the complexity of medicine increases, so too do the challenges with multidisciplinary communication and coordinated patient care. Anesthesiology represents a field for which there is no required study for medical students, pediatric residents, or neonatal-perinatal medicine fellows in the United States, so a neonatologist may have never received any formal training in anesthesiology (and vice versa for pediatric anesthesiologists in neonatology). In this review, we address frequently asked questions of neonatologists to anesthesiologists to better frame common issues. These topics include thermal regulation, fluid management, airway management, and the field of regional anesthesiology. Finally, collaborative efforts between the surgical and medical fields, such as the American College of Surgeons Children’s Surgery Verification Quality Improvement Program, and the American Academy of Pediatrics NICU Verification Program, are ongoing and robust; these programs represent important opportunities to significantly improve the perioperative care of infants. Our hope is that this summary can serve as a primer and reference for those caring for neonatal patients during any perioperative period, including seasoned neonatologists and those early in their training. It is our further desire that this review will lead to improved communication and collegiality between the specialties.