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EP153 A teaching programme for continuous spinal anaesthesia (CSA) in a district general hospital (DGH) as part of advanced regional anaesthesia training

rapm · 2025-09-10 · canonical JSON source

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Background and Aims Continuous spinal anaesthesia (CSA) is a technique where a catheter is placed into the intrathecal space allowing titrated local anaesthetic to be injected producing a subarachnoid block. Advantages are better haemodynamic stability and ability to extend anaesthesia in prolonged operations.Methods 16 CSA were performed with patient selection including, severe aortic stenosis, heart failure and respiratory disease. Surgical selection included prolonged/bilateral lower limb arthroplasty, complex hip fractures and palliative laparotomy. Patients were consented and underwent spinal sonography followed by catheter placement under aseptic conditions. We used the Pajunk® spinal catheter system NRFit intralong 21G x 90 mm Sprotte special tip with 25G x 90 cm PA-catheter. After placement the catheter was left 4 cm in the subarachnoid space. We gave a bolus of 0.5–1 ml 0.5% plain bupivacaine followed by top-up doses of 0.5 ml every 30 minutes.Results All 16 operations (4 general surgery and 12 orthopaedic) were carried out successfully with patients’ blood pressure variations within 20% of baseline value.Abstract EP153 Figure 1Continuous spinal anaesthesia (CSA) catheter systemConclusions Traditionally combined spinal epidural (CSE) is used in high-risk patients where there are concerns about anaesthetic stability or length of surgery. However, the top-up doses required are always high volume which has the potential for hemodynamic compromise. The emerging technique of CSA could be a good alternative to CSE as all the patients in our series had complete hemodynamically stability with good outcomes. We started initially giving top-ups every 45 minutes but 2 patients had motor power and movement in the lower limb being operated on, therefore we changed our protocol to every 30 minutes.