The outcomes measure of wide awake hand surgery

Objective: To measure the effects of WAHS intra-operatively with respect to subject’s well-being, pain and choice for wide awake surgery. Methodology: A cross sectional study of seventy patients with age range from 15-65 years, who underwent hand surgery in Jinnah Burn and Reconstructive Surgery Center, Lahore, between January 2019 to August 2019. The effectiveness of anesthesia was measured by pain, well-being and patient preferences. Pain was rated using the visual analogue scale (VAS). Patient well-being was tested depending on how they felt with respect to options on the Likert scale depicting in terms of extremely well, well, less well and extremely less well on VAS scoring. The preference of the subject was assessed by his experience in the surgery and the anesthesia they chose. Results: The total number of patients was 70, whose age was 33.63±6.94 in the range of 15 to 65 years. The average pain score on the VAS was 0.51±1.38 and the duration of surgery was 1.43±0.35 hours. Pain was a variation in the outcome observed in operation during surgery. There were 84.3% of patients who did not experience any pain during their surgery. The remaining patients showed various levels of pain on VAS. Conclusion: The benefits of WAHS are that short duration hand surgery procedures can be done using local anesthesia containing epinephrine. It is cost effective, avoids the side effects of general anesthesia, avoids the use of a tourniquet and reduces the burden of surgical patients requiring general or regional anesthesia procedure. It also avoids patient admission in to the hospital thus sparing hospital beds