Anaesthesia

Our dedicated, specialist-led veterinary anaesthesia team is here to support your pet if they need sedation, pain relief or a general anaesthetic during investigation, treatment or surgery.

Our anaesthesia and analgesia specialist Liz Leece leads the dedicated team supervising and managing your pet and providing a personalised plan specific to their needs.

All patients are monitored closely during their anaesthetic by our highly qualified team using hi-tech equipment as needed for their individual risk or procedure:

• Continuous electrocardiography
• Capnography
• Pulse oximetry
• Temperature and indirect blood pressure monitoring
• Arterial blood gas monitoring in critical patients
• Direct arterial blood pressure monitoring
• Urine output
• Neuromuscular blocking as required

Enhancing pain relief

We are passionate about enhancing pain relief for patients and are pioneering the use of alternative pain relief drugs and management of hard-to-treat conditions.

Every patient is treated according to their medical status and temperament, the procedure they are undergoing, and their response to a strange environment.

Pain relief modalities we offer includes:

• Ultrasound for delivery of local anaesthetics directly around the nerve
• Epidural analgesia (an injection around the spinal cord)
• Peripheral nerve blocks, which help pets walk more quickly following surgery

Local Nerve Blocks

Previously, local analgesia was provided using the ‘blind technique’, which utilises anatomical knowledge to inject pain relief in the area of the nerves to be blocked but is less accurate. Many practices provide simple nerve blocks attempting to block out the pain at surgical sites.

At Paragon we use a dedicated ultrasound machine to allow us to visualise the actual nerve and deposit local anaesthetic round it, providing precise nerve blocks.  This also allows us to provide more complex nerve blocks to maximise pain relief whilst minimising any side effects, for example following hind leg surgery our patients can walk on their operated leg but not experience pain.

Perioperative analgesia

Our team can provide the perfect pain relief plan while your pet is in the hospital. Pre-emptive pain relief is given before surgery even starts to help us with post operative management.  An intraoperative plan may involve the use of local anaesthetics wherever we can combine these with other drugs.  This makes for a more comfortable patient after surgery, if breakthrough pain is anticipated.  The patient is then monitored closely overnight to check pain does not develop once local anaesthesia starts to wear off.

Anxiety can also affect pain in our pets, and because they have often been in hospital with our nurses overnight before surgery, this allows us to get them settled, and use to the environment, making it easier to provide the right level of pain relief.