Preoperative Fasting Practices Across Three Anesthesia Societies: Survey of Practitioners
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Pulmonary aspiration of gastric contents is recognized as a complication of anesthesia. To minimize that risk, anesthesiologists advised fasting for solid foods and liquids for an often prolonged period of time. However, 30 years ago, evidence was promulgated that fasting for clear liquids was unnecessary to ensure an empty stomach. Despite a strong evidence base and the knowledge that fasting may be physiologically harmful and unpleasant for patients, the adoption of society guidelines recommending short fasting periods for clear fluids into clinical practice is uncertain. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to determine the current practices of anesthetists with respect to fasting guidelines. METHODS: An electronic internet survey was distributed to anesthetists in Canada (CAN), Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), and Europe (EUR) during April 2014 to February 2015. The anesthetists were asked about fasting guidelines, their recommendations to patients for the consumption of clear fluids and solid foods, and the reasons and consequences if these guidelines were not followed. RESULTS: A total of 971 anesthetists completed the survey (CAN, n=679; ANZ, n=185; and EUR, n=107). Although 85.0% (818/962) of these participants claimed that their advice to patients followed current society guidelines, approximately 50.4% (476/945) enforced strict fasting and did not allow clear fluids after midnight. The primary reasons given were with regard to problems with a variable operating room schedule (255/476, 53.6%) and safety issues surrounding the implementation of clear fluid drinking guidelines (182/476, 38.2%). CONCLUSIONS: Many anesthetists continue to follow outdated practices. The current interest in further liberalizing preoperative fluid intake will require more change in anesthesia culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".