OVERVIEW

You are providing state-of-the art minimally invasive surgery for your patients. But is your perioperative care meetingthe same standards? What is keeping your patients in the hospital and impeding their return to their baselineperformance and function? Recent guidelines identify over twenty evidence-based interventions spanning the entireperioperative period that reduce surgical stress, improve functional and physiologic recovery and reduce morbidity, allowing for shortor ultrashort hospital stays and decreasing costs.,br/.
Enhanced Recovery Pathways (ERPs) are standardized, coordinated, multidisciplinaryperioperative care plans that incorporate these multiple interventions into a package. The ERP approach challenges surgical traditionsfor which there is a lack of evidence and that may in fact impair recovery, such as routine preoperative fasting, bowel preparation,and the prolonged use of drains and tubes.

The evidence for the benefits of ERPs in decreasing length of stay and morbidity isstrongest in colorectal surgery but there is emerging evidence in other areas, including upper GI and hepatobiliary surgery. This fullday post-graduate course will introduce the ERP concept, review the evidence-base for the building blocks of an ERP program, andprovide practical advice from experts to kick-start your own program.