Copyright © 2012 Catherine Gerrard and Steve Roberts. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Ultrasound-guided regional anaesthesia is rapidly growing in popularity. Initially, most evidence was for the benefits when used in adults, but there is now a multitude of well-documented benefits in children. The practice of regional anaesthesia in children differs somewhat from that of adults in that in the majority of cases it is used for analgesia and performed under general anaesthesia to allow placement, rather than alone for anaesthesia as in adults. The purpose of this paper is to review the basic aspects of ultrasound regional anaesthesia before going into detail regarding specific techniques.