How to Improve the Recovery of Fracture Patients When No Pool Is Available

Almost without exception, most equine surgeons and anaesthetists would consider some form of ‘assisted recovery’ to be the preferable method to recover horses from anaesthesia after fracture repair.

However, the term ‘assisted recovery’ encompasses a wide range of interventions ranging from some form of mild manual restraint through to rope recoveries, slings, tilt-tables, airbeds, to hydropools and pool-raft systems.

The fact that no single approach to assisted recovery has become universally adopted suggests that no system is perfect and each system has strengths and weaknesses. Some types may suit some hospitals but not others depending on the level of investment, existing facilities, horse population, personnel and experience.

Further impediments to evaluating which approach is best are: the relative paucity of peer-reviewed reports focusing on assisted recovery intervention techniques (with even less information published in these reports on recoveries involving fracture cases due to the relatively low numbers of fracture patients in most hospital populations), comparison between reports is difficult as all reports are the retrospective single centre, and even apparently similar techniques (e.g. rope recoveries) can have major important differences in set-up and execution. During the presentation, I will discuss the various approaches and their reported results, although few reports highlight a fracture repair subpopulation. I will also discuss the common challenges that can adversely affect the outcome of all assisted recoveries such as pain, excitement and ataxia and discuss various strategies to manage these challenges.