Building an analgesic protocol

In a dvm360 interview, Tasha McNerney, BS, CVT, CVPP, VTS (Anesthesia), director of training and staff development at Mount Laurel Animal Hospital in New Jersey, and a founder of the Anesthesia Nerds organization, discusses her upcoming continuing education lecture for veterinary technicians at the 2025 Veterinary Meeting & Expo (VMX) in Orlando, Florida. She plans to address some human medicine concepts that can be applied to animal health with VMX attendees, during her talk. The session—Practical Pain Management: More Than Opioids—will be held 12 pm to 1 pm at the Rosen Centre.

The following is a transcript of the video:

Tasha McNerney , BS, CVT, CVPP, VTS (Anesthesia): At VMX, I am doing a 90-minute session on Sunday, [January 26, 2025], which is going to cover how can we build a good, solid analgesic protocol; an anesthetic protocol that is not going to rely heavily on opioids. Now, that's not to say opioid free, but we're going to use some of the concepts from the human medicine protocols, which is known as ERAS—enhanced recovery after surgery. And we're going to look at how can we use some of those protocols in our veterinary medicine cases and utilize less opioids; so things like, how can we prevent post-operative nausea and vomiting? How can we utilize more local anesthesia in our patients' protocols? How can we get away from just heavy use of opioids and look at things like more adjunctive analgesics and things that we can send home with our patients that are going to provide analgesia, again, without a heavy reliance on opioids. So, that's going to be the Sunday session.