Intraoperative awareness and recall can occur despite the use of proper anaesthetic techniques and intraoperative monitoring including entropy.
Intraoperative awareness occurs when a patient becomes conscious during a surgical procedure performed under general anaesthesia and subsequently has recall of these events. The experience can be quite disturbing and traumatic, and some patients may even need counselling after their surgery to help lessen feelings of confusion, stress, or trauma associated with the experience. For this reason, anaesthesia professionals are seriously committed to minimising the risk of intraoperative awareness under general anaesthesia. Objectives-The purpose of this study was to evaluate the incidence of awareness with recall after surgery, which is an infrequent occurrence but of significant concern with significant adverse psychological sequelae and medicolegal implications.
Ahmad et al. (2017) studied this question.