Planning for ventilation with general anesthesia

Sponsored by Banfield Pet Hospital

Tasha McNerney, BS, CVT, CVPP, VTS (Anesthesia), cofounder of Veterinary Anesthesia Nerds, was recently tasked with presenting a lecture on ventilation at dvm360’s 2024 Fetch Coastal conference in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The talk aimed to address lung physiology, mechanical ventilation, and various other ventilation modes, and when they will be the most beneficial to your patients.

A practicing technician at Mount Laurel Animal Hospital in New Jersey, McNerney discussed her lecture and the role of mechanical ventilation for cases in general anesthesia, in an interview with dvm360. The following is a transcript of the video:

Tasha McNerney, BS, CVT, CVPP, VTS (Anesthesia): Mechanical ventilation is something that I am pretty passionate about. It just kind of became a newer thing for me in the past year. Certainly, mechanical ventilation is not new. We've been doing this for years and years. I mean, in human medicine, we have people that that's their whole job, as respiratory therapists, right? And that's all they do, is ventilation.

So we know that our [veterinary] patients under anesthesia, often—almost always—will hypoventilate. Now, there's different ways that we can do things. We can be the ventilator. We can do something called intermittent positive pressure ventilation, or we can utilize a ventilator. But then we look at really breaking the ventilator and the mechanical ventilator down even further. There's all these different kinds of ventilation modes and ventilation strategies we can use based on the patient in particular. So the same way that we create an individualized anesthetic plan, we can create an individualized ventilation plan that's going to make the most sense for that patient.

For more articles and interviews from Fetch Coastal, visit our dvm360 website and dedicated conference news page.