The aim of OrphanAnesthesia is to improve patient safety by providing recommendations for the anesthetic care of patients with rare diseases.
For many of these conditions, only limited and widely scattered information is available – especially regarding disease-specific considerations during anesthesia. This lack of consolidated knowledge can make clinical management challenging in both elective and emergency surgery.
In response to this need, OrphanAnesthesia was launched in 2005 by the Scientific Working Group on Paediatric Anaesthesia of the German Society for Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine (DGAI). The project’s digital database brings together dispersed scientific evidence and the practical experience of recognized experts, making this collective knowledge accessible to healthcare professionals, patients, and patient organizations.
The recommendations follow a standardized format and undergo an international peer-review process involving specialists in anesthesia as well as experts from another medical specialty relevant to the underlying disease.
As a voluntary and internationally oriented initiative, OrphanAnesthesia publishes all recommendations in English, some of them also in additional languages. Together with physicians and scientists from around the world, and in collaboration with the European information platform Orphanet and various European professional societies (such as ESPA, ESAIC SARNePI, and others), we continue to consolidate anesthesiology knowledge information on rare diseases and make it freely and globally accessible.