NAP5: Information for patients and carers

This section of the website provides information particularly to patients, their families or their carers. We hope it is helpful to any patient worried about experiencing accidental awareness during anaesthesia, or to patients who have had this experience.

There are three files that can be viewed by clicking on the icons.

First is an article designed for patients summarising what we now know about accidental awareness during anaesthesia. This is one of the chapters contained in the Royal College's 'Risks Associated with your anaesthetic' which can viewed in full here. This updated chapter contains information yielded by the NAP5 project.

NAP5 Patient Support Pack

Second is the NAP5 Patient Support Pack, which provides step-by-step guidance to practitioners - and we hope patients and their carers - about what to do if a patient accidentally experiences awareness during general anaesthesia. By reading this, we hope that patients or their carers will understand the principles by which their future care may be managed.

NAP5 Summary for Patients

The third file is a summary of the NAP5 project itself, to provide some information to patients about what the NAP5 project and report - presented on the other web-pages here - are about. This contains only some summary information about the salient findings and also summarises the methods used by the project, should patients be interested to know how the advice we are providing came about. Of course, those patients who wish to know more about the NAP5 project and report can freely access the other web-pages on this site, and thus have available exactly the same information as it provided to medical practitioners.

Full Report and Recommendations

Additional documents which you may find useful are the NAP5 recommendations, and the full NAP5 Report.