The ERAS project for VATS lobectomy—the Italian VATS Group

The mission of the ERAS Group (Enhanced Recovery After Surgery Group), an active branch of the Italian VATS Group (www.vatsgroup.org), is to promote an upgrade of the current standard perioperative clinical practice after VATS lobectomy and to emphasize the assessment of patients’ outcome.

This collaborative multidisciplinary Group was assembled by Andrea Droghetti and Professor Roberto Crisci in 2016 and is focused on multimodal perioperative clinical care: standardizing practices from different institutions and striving for excellence in clinical practice.

The Italian VATS Group was founded in 2013 and endorsed by Italian Society of Thoracic Surgery to promote and standardize the practice of VATS lobectomy among Italian thoracic surgeons. After 4 years of experience with the National Prospective VATS Lobectomy Registry, with nearly 6,000 cases enrolled, the ERAS Database was developed in order to share clinical data, improve outcomes through research and promote evidence-based practice.

This focused issue of the Journal will have an immediate didactic value in helping the multi-disciplinary team understanding the fundamental skills of ERAS and achieving success in ERAS for Thoracic Surgery.

This manual presents different experiences and “real-life” scenarios from around the world, although it also contains several protocols, focusing specifically on the anesthetic and surgical techniques, nursing, nutrition and metabolic response. It also includes a prospective data collection focused on ERAS.

We are confident that this issue may fill an existing gap by providing a major bibliographical tool and by facilitating the practice of ERAS.

As long as the Registry will give us more information and more experience emerges, further manuals on the topic of ERAS for VATS lobectomy will be published.

Last but not least, I would like to thank all the authors for their work and support in this first focused issue on ERAS in Vats Lobectomy.

Andrea Droghetti