Dental Anaesthesia and Analgesia of the Dog and Cat

Abstract

Registered veterinary nurses (RVN) and student veterinary nurses (SVN) may be involved with providing perioperative care for dental patients every week in practice. There are many ways that the RVN, working with the veterinary surgeon (VS), can help to ensure the patient has a comfortable and uneventful time from admission to discharge. This includes pre anaesthetic assessments and working together to develop an anaesthetic plan, with multimodal analgesia and careful patient monitoring and intervention as needed. This article looks at the dental patient through all stages of the anaesthetic period, and will aim to give the reader some guidance on how they should be managing these cases to provide the best care possible.