Anesthesia for Operative Caesarean Section Delivery

- Purpose and Scope of the guidelines

The purpose of these guidelines is to assist anesthesiologists to enhance the quality of their anesthetic practice based on evidence for the care of Caesarean Section patients, leading to improve patient safety, improve in health indicators such as mortality and incidence and severity of anesthesia-related complications and to increase patient satisfaction.

These guidelines focus on the anesthetic management of pregnant patients during operative Caesarean Section delivery, and selected aspects of postpartum care and analgesia (i.e., neuraxial opioids for postpartum analgesia after neuraxial anesthesia and postoperative analgesia after general anesthesia (GA) for Caesarean delivery), as well as management of emergencies related to operative Caesarean Section delivery. The intended patient population includes, but is not limited to, intrapartum and postpartum patients with uncomplicated pregnancies or with common obstetric problems.

The guidelines do not apply to patients undergoing surgery during pregnancy, gynecological patients, or parturients with chronic medical disease (e.g., severe cardiac, renal, or neurological disease). In addition, these guidelines do not address (1) postpartum analgesia for vaginal delivery. (2) analgesia after tubal ligation, or (3) Pain relief during normal delivery.