Regional anesthesia initiative is improving how we care for patients, and the planet

​Across Vancouver Coastal Health, we're seeing many transformative projects that are improving health systems and environmental sustainability. A new project, supported by Vancouver Coastal Health and Boehringer Ingelheim collaboration, is focusing on the delivery of high-quality, lower-carbon care by expanding regional anesthesia programs across VCH.

Regional anesthesia, a type of pain management for surgery that numbs a large part of the body, has a whole host of benefits. It decreases patients' post-surgery pain, nausea and vomiting; causes fewer adverse events and complications; and also reduces length of stay. It improves surgical team and operating department experience and efficiency. And, as we work to reduce the health system's environmental impact, it reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and lowers the carbon footprint of surgical care when compared with inhaled anesthesia.

At the Providence Breast Centre at Mount Saint Joseph Hospital (MSJ), regional anesthesia has become the default anesthetic for breast cancer surgery. This transition has seen overwhelming positive results: a better patient experience including quicker recovery time post-surgery; a 20 per cent decrease in operating room time; and approximately 25 per cent reduction in use of inhalation anesthetics and direct surgical suite GHG emissions.

Motivated by the success and experience at MSJ, an anesthesia team led by Dr. Steven Lee and Dr. Peter Rose, is expanding the use of regional anesthesia to additional surgical procedures at VGH and UBC Hospital. The pilot project, launched in January 2024, will run until April 2025. The end goal is to spread and scale the use of regional anesthesia across all our communities of care, so stay tuned to hear about the exciting outcomes from this project.