Manipal Hospitals achieves ERAS certification

Manipal Hospitals has become the first healthcare provider in Southeast Asia to receive the Enhanced Recovery after Surgery (ERAS) certification. This programme offers enormous benefits to the various health care fields including surgical oncology, gynaecology and surgical gastroenterology.

It is an evidence-based programme, with a wide range of benefits that helps patients decrease postoperative pain and complications with shorter stays at the hospital and better and rapid recovery. ERAS has helped multi-disciplinary surgeons of Manipal Hospitals achieve exceptional results in post-surgery care in their respective areas of medical management - far ahead of the traditional post-surgery care in India.

ERAS helps patients to engage themselves in the treatment plan by active participation with the caregiver. The programme consists of three parameters: the pre-operative optimisation, intraoperative goal directed therapy, and the postoperative strategies. These parameters meticulously provide the patient and the family preoperative and post-surgery counselling.

It helps the patient clearly know the goals of the health care provider in terms of risk of infections, nutrition and diet, minimal fasting, easy mobilisation in the comfort of their homes post-surgery and other regimens, unlike in the case of traditional surgeries. An ERAS pilot programme was conducted for 507 patients.

Deepak Venugopalan, Regional COO, Bengaluru cluster, Mysuru and Salem, Manipal Hospitals said, “The implementation of ERAS at Manipal, has been an eyeopener and certainly gives a big boost to post-surgery care. It is a matter of pride as the existence of this in a developed world, has been implemented in our context. We have created protocols that are Indianised and it can be used in our hospitals now. We will expand the implementation of ERAS in other specialisations moving forward.”

In order to receive the certification, the multidisciplinary surgeons, anaesthesiologists, nurses, and nutritionists of the Manipal hospital underwent a comprehensive training programme by the NCARE ERAS society in Switzerland and subsequently trained virtually through interactive seminars for over 2 years.

The doctors certified for the programme include Dr Somasekhar SP, Chairman and HOD Surgical Oncology, Manipal Comprehensive Cancer Center, Manipal Hospitals, Old Airport Road, Dr Shabber Zaveri, Consultant - Surgical Oncology, Manipal Comprehensive Cancer Centre, Dr Ashwin Rajagopal, Consultant - Surgical Oncology, Manipal Comprehensive Cancer Centre, Dr. Rohit Kumar, Consultant - Surgical Oncology, Dr. Nagaraj Palankar, Consultant - Surgical Gastroenterology and Dr. H S Murthy, Consultant – Anaesthesiology.