Precision anaesthesia: A paradigm shift in patient care

Anaesthesia and surgery in the 21st century are the safest they have ever been, with over 300 million operations occurring worldwide every year. Mortality rates are consistently around 0.5–1% for elective non cardiac surgery; however, this commonly cited metric only describes part of the story. It is time for us to acknowledge, as many of our patients do, that mortality and length of hospital stay are useful but incomplete measures of perioperative success. Recently, there has been a shift in focus towards Value-Based HealthCare (VBHC), patient-centred outcome metrics (Patient-Reported Outcome Measures or PROMs) and Patient-Reported Experience Measures (PREMs) as markers of success. In this review, we examine the current state of patient-centred precision care (PC) with relevance to anaesthesia.