Ethical Tenets of Perioperative Care: “Finding My Surgical Way Home”

In the course of their daily practice, anesthesiologists are confronted with a number of conventional ethical issues connected to situations ranging from informed consent to endof-life decision making The specialty of anesthesiology has recently evolved to include not only critical care and pain medicine but also perioperative medicine. The full spectrum of perioperative expertise is manifest in the perioperative surgical home (PSH), a new and innovative care model initially developed and now being widely advocated by the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) in close collaboration with vital surgical, nursing, health care administrative, and payer stakeholders The PSH is a patient-centered, institutionled, interdisciplinary, team-based, coordinated, and-where possible-standardized care model that guides the patient from presurgical decision making to postdischarge care The PSH seeks to improve the surgery experience and outcomes and to add measurable value to the highest-cost segment of health care.