Publication date: Sep 09, 2025
Restoration of surgical capacity is essential to post-COVID-19 recovery. This study explored the use and safety of anaesthesia options for inguinal hernia surgery, a common tracer condition, to describe current global practice and highlight opportunities to build the capacity of health systems. This is a secondary analysis of an international prospective cohort study of consecutive patients who underwent elective inguinal hernia surgery. We used a consensus process to define generalisable outcomes to measure patient selection, utilisation of hospital capacity and peri-operative safety in patients who received locoregional, spinal or general anaesthesia for their surgery. In total, 16,554 patients from 83 countries were included. Locoregional anaesthesia was performed in 1536 (9. 2%) of patients, compared with 9165 (55. 4%) who had general and 55,853 (35. 4%) who had spinal anaesthesia. Patient selection outcomes were comparable across anaesthesia groups. As a measure of hospital capacity, adjusted day-case rates were higher for locoregional anaesthesia (OR 6. 62, 95%CI 5. 13-8. 54, p
| Concepts | Keywords |
|---|---|
| Covid | anaesthesia |
| Global | developing countries |
| Surgery | inguinal hernia |
| Tracer | surgery |
Semantics
| Type | Source | Name |
|---|---|---|
| disease | MESH | inguinal hernia |
| disease | MESH | COVID-19 |
| disease | IDO | process |