a b s t r a c t Introduction: Post-anesthetic care reduces the anesthesia-related postoperative complications and mortality, shortens the length of stay at the postoperative care units and improves patient satisfaction.Objective: To establish a set of recommendations for immediate post-anesthetic care of patients that received general/regional anesthesia or profound/moderate sedation at the postoperative care units.Methodology: This is a process of "rapid" clinical practice guidelines adaptation, including systematic search. The illegible guidelines for adaptation were rated using AGREE II. The guideline selected to be adapted as the clinical practice handbook was Practice guidelines for post-anesthetic care of the American Society of Anesthesiologists. The manual was evaluated in terms of implementation ability, up-to-date information, relevancy, ethical considerations and patient safety by the group of anesthesiologists and epidemiologists based on Delphi.
Result:The manual kept the recommendations on evaluation and monitoring, pharmacological management of postoperative nausea and vomiting, antagonistic actions for sedatives and analgesics and neuromuscular block agents, emergency management and anesthesia recovery, as well as the criteria for discharge from the unit. Indications about the conditions and requirements of the unit and patient admission were also included.