Followup

Our regional rotation is one of the few anesthesia rotations where we do a lot of patient followup. For a regular anesthetic, I don't usually visit a patient post-operatively to see how everything went. I'll often scan a chart to make sure no untoward events happened, but it simply isn't built into our day to visit all our post-ops. (I think there is a lot of value in doing so and am a proponent of seeing inpatients after their anesthetic, but to work, time has to be set aside for it). In the case of a big surgery or anesthetic, I'll often use some of my lunch hour or stay late at the hospital visiting a patient, something I mostly do for cardiac surgeries, liver transplants, or cases that had a little deviation from normal.

But on our regional anesthesia rotation, we make a big point to see every single patient we block. We check to make sure the nerve block worked for the surgery, provided some pain relief, and resolved without an issue. We make sure questions are answered, patients are satisfied, and surgeons give their feedback about a block. Even for outpatients, we will call and check in on them.

The process of followup is pretty satisfying; we see the result of our handiwork, feel good about the blocks that went swimmingly, and get a sense of the blocks that failed and why. We also get to do some PR, teaching patients about anesthesiology, educating them about nerve blocks, and explaining why we do what we do. However, the system we use for documenting followup is a monstrosity. Most of my evenings were spent struggling with a database that didn't load right, asked the wrong questions, and couldn't be edited. They are working on updating it, but as with all things in medicine, change is slow, and the paperwork is much worse than the clinical care of patients.