Raising the Standard – Why Specialist Anaesthesia Matters

It usually starts the same way. A call from a vet I know well:
“Hey, I’ve got a tricky one. I’m confident with my usual anaesthetics, but this patient…”

That pause tells me everything. They’re weighing up their comfort zone against the patient’s needs, and the risk.

This is where I come in. And honestly? This is where I believe our profession can, and must, do better.

Too often, anaesthesia is framed as a box to tick before the “real” work happens. For me, it’s the opposite, anaesthesia is part of the real work. How a patient experiences those minutes or hours under our care can define how well they recover, whether their pain is controlled, and in some cases, whether they survive.

I’ve seen high-risk patients in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, and the Sunshine Coast undergo procedures that many would have considered too dangerous simply because the right planning, protocols, and monitoring were in place. That’s not luck. That’s specialist anaesthesia done properly.

Years of extra training teach you more than pharmacology charts and monitoring protocols; they teach you to read a patient like a second language. It’s knowing when a subtle shift in capnography isn’t “just a blip.” It’s recognising that a patient’s breed, age, and disease history all feed into a customised sedation anaesthetic plan.

In specialist anaesthetic services for vets, the difference is in the detail:

• Tailored protocols built for the individual, not the “average” patient
• Constant, skilled monitoring, not one eye on the patient while juggling another job
• Complex case capability so patients who might be considered “too risky” elsewhere still get the treatment they need

I don’t say this to put down general practice, I started there. Any one of us can only ever do our best with the tools, time, and team we have. Sometimes, bringing in a specialist changes the equation entirely.

If you’re a vet confident with your day-to-day anaesthesia, it can feel like admitting defeat to refer. It’s not. It’s just good medicine.

Sometimes that support looks like:

• A quick telemedicine chat to troubleshoot a plan
• Me coming to your clinic for the procedure
• A full referral to a facility with ICU-level peri-anaesthetic care

Every option is about giving that patient the safest, most comfortable experience possible.

When I work alongside a vet on a high-risk case, the relief is palpable. The vet can focus entirely on their surgical or diagnostic job without the mental split of “What’s happening with the anaesthetic?”

I’ve had referring vets tell me they finished a procedure feeling less drained, less stressed, and more confident the patient would recover well. And owners? They notice. They see their pet brighter, more themselves, and without that foggy “anaesthetic hangover” days later.

Unlike human medicine, we don’t have massive datasets on anaesthesia outcomes across the country. But I can tell you, from every day in the field, that recovery is smoother, faster, and more complete when anaesthesia is managed well.

In poorly managed cases, the stress response alone can derail recovery. Pain spikes, healing slows, complications creep in. In well-managed cases, the patient wakes up warm, comfortable, and stable, and that momentum carries them through the following days.

Access to specialist anaesthesia varies wildly across Brisbane, the Gold Coast, and the Sunshine Coast. There are only a handful of us in Queensland: four in private practice and two in universities. That’s not enough to meet the demand, but it means even a single conversation can make a difference.

My hope is that as awareness grows among vets and owners, specialist anaesthesia will stop being the exception for complex cases and start being the standard for any patient who needs that extra layer of care.

We often discuss multimodal analgesia, which involves layering nerve blocks, systemic medications, and local infiltration to keep pain signals low from the start. However, the same principle applies to anaesthesia itself.

Mixing techniques means lighter doses of each drug, better stability, fewer side effects, and a smoother wake-up. For example:

• Local nerve blocks paired with light inhalant anaesthesia
• Opioid plus alpha-2 agonist combinations for targeted sedation
• Titrated infusions to maintain stable, responsive anaesthetic depth.

This isn’t “extra;” it’s good anaesthetic practice. The more we integrate it into our protocols, the better our patients perform.