[Text on screen: The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
What is WALANT surgery?]

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[Text on screen: Hisham Awan, MD
Orthopaedic Surgery – Hand Surgery
Ohio State Wexner Medical Center]

Hisham Awan, MD: WALANT surgery. WALANT stands for Wide Awake Local Anesthesia No Tourniquet. So it's a sort of a newer trend that's become very popular in hand surgery where the patient for many procedures can stay completely awake for the surgery. So they don't have any anesthesia. So they're not groggy. They don't have to have pre-admission, pre-surgical testing or anything like that. So they stay wide awake.

The LA is the Local Anesthesia, so we are able to numb up a patient so they're comfortable enough that the surgery can be done without the anesthesia.

And then no tourniquet. A tourniquet is what we, a lot of times, use for surgery to squeeze the arms to prevent bleeding. With the technique that we use to inject the local anesthetic, there's a medication epinephrine in there that helps control bleeding so we don't need to use the tourniquet for a lot of these procedures. So that's what WALANT stands for.

[Text on screen: The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
For more information, visit: go.osu.edu/hand_surgery]

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