[70] Evidence-Based Perioperative Medicine
What is Evidence-Based Perioperative Medicine? Perioperative medicine includes anaesthesia, acute postoperative pain treatment, labour pain treatment, surgical intensive care, resuscitation, emergency medicine, and trauma medicine. Evidence-based Medicine is the process of systematically finding, appraising, and using contemporaneous research findings as the basis for clinical decisions. Thus, Evidence-based Perioperative Medicine is about rational decision making in perioperative medicine: What should be recommended to patients? Which interventions should be purchased? What are the research priorities?
Our main activities:
We produce data: We are performing high quality systematic reviews and meta-analyses that are relevant to health care providers and patients. Thus, we are creating new best evidence knowledge, based on the critical analysis and review of historical (published and unpublished) data. Although our main focus is on perioperative medicine, we provide our expertise for projects that go beyond our clinical speciality. We are also conducting randomised controlled trials.
We disseminate data: We are publishing our products in paper-print and electronic peer reviewed medical journals. We are organising EBM workshops for anaesthesiologists and surgeons. We are organising scientific congresses. Finally, we are publishing the first book on Evidence-based perioperative medicine. The first edition was published in 2000, the second edition in August 2003.
We implement data: Valid clinical guidelines for prevention, treatment and diagnosis should be based on best-evidence data from the scientific literature. We are constantly working on such guidelines that are relevant to the practice of perioperative medicine. An example is the rational approach to the control of postoperative