The National Service Framework for Children [DoH, 2003] encourages the development of guidelines and the use of audit to ensure that the treatment and care offered to children is continually improving. Thus an audit was undertaken in a South London Day Surgery Unit to ascertain the fasting times of children undergoing dental treatment under general anaesthetic. A literature search identified that clear fluids can be safely ingested until two hours prior to general anaesthesia and the Trust guidelines were found to be congruent with current evidence.

Maintaining the patient's airway in the post anaesthetic stage of the patient's care is a skilful endeavour and all practitioners working in a recovery unit must be familiar with all types of obstruction, the causes and how to treat them. Awareness must also be demonstrated of the airway adjuncts available to maintain a patient's airway.

IN debating the issue of whether or not nursing care should be perceived within a framework of cultural competence, this paper briefly describes the background of this approach to nursing, and as an exemplar, discusses how culture can impact on the practice of anaesthetics and peri–anaesthetic care. This is illustrated through drawing on my own transcultural experiences while employed for nearly five years as a non–physician anaesthetist in Saudi Arabia and may therefore be of interest to those practitioners involved in the delivery of anaesthetics and peri–anaesthetic care.

This article discusses staffing levels in the Post Anaesthetic Care Unit, following key recommendations that have been documented in response to the changing nature of both anaesthesia and surgery. An audit was carried out at the unit in York Hospital to determine whether the staff felt that patient care and staff vulnerability was compromised during times when the Recovery nurse worked alone.

This overview of the research process is for nurses who have either not had a formal course of study in the area, or have not thought about the process in some time. Using a systematic method of viewing the research process should improve understanding. By knowing how question type determines design, and ultimately how results are structured, nurses will be better able to engage in the process as knowledgeable participants. Using this framework should allow those, who wish to do so, to further study the numerous variations in designs and nuances within in each level.

The rapid pace of change in the National Health Service (NHS) over the last five years has resulted in significant alterations to the way health care is, and will be delivered in the UK. The essential aims are to cut down waiting times, put more money into the system &C use it more effectively to improve patient experience through setting practice standards/maximising on staff potential/empowering patients/funding more beds and much more.

The regulation of body temperature is one of a variety of mechanisms, which play a part in maintaining a stable internal environment in the body thus enabling the body to function optimally. It is crucial that the core body temperature is maintained within a narrow (36–37.5°C) range [Luckmann, 1997]. Thermoregulation in the operating theatre and post anaesthetic care unit is often an underemphasized concern for surgical patients. Anaesthesia and surgery commonly cause substantial alterations in the temperature of surgical patients.

Unnecessary heat loss, hypothermia, the typical variation, results from a combination of anaesthetic-induced impairment of thermoregulatory control, a cool, operating room environment and other factors exclusive to surgery and anaesthesia. Estimates of the incidence of inadvertent perioperative hypothermia range from 60% to 90% of all surgical cases [Bernthal, 1999, Litwack, 1995], when this condition is defined as a body temperature below 36°C (degrees Celsius) 96.8°F (degrees Fahrenheit) (Arndt, 1999). Hypothermia apart from causing a very unpleasant sensation of cold, places the patient at risk of developing life-threatening events, which include altered cardiac performance, delayed emergence from anaesthesia and increased rates of morbidity and mortality. Although the aim of temperature management by intraoperative medical and nursing staff is prevention of heat loss, the objective of post anaesthetic recovery room staff is usually the restoration of normothermia. Thus, perioperative nurses need to be aware of the need to monitor patient's temperature, be familiar with different patient warming/rewarming methods and be alert for potential problems that can arise from hypothermia.