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Just a little oxygen to breathe as you go off to sleep...is it always a good idea?
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Administration of oxygen 100% to patients before inducing anaesthesia provides a reserve of oxygen, mostly in the patient's functional residual capacity (FRC), to extend the time before hypoxia occurs, should there be difficulties achieving adequate ventilation after induction. Preoxygenation is now widely used, and in the operating theatres in which I work, the practice has extended beyond the anaesthetists to nursing staff and operating department practitioners, who now automatically apply a face mask to the patient while I administer the induction agents. An editorial in 2004 argued that routine preoxygenation ‘could be recommended to the profession regardless of the experience, expertise or grade of the practitioner, and mandated for trainees’.1 The author of this recommendation, and the enthusiastic theatre staff, all make the assumption that administering oxygen 100% is harmless. In his translation of the Hippocratic oath, Galen put great emphasis on the phrase primum non nocere (first, do no
St James's University Hospital Leeds UK
E-mail: a.lumb@leeds.ac.uk
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