Ideas That Work: Don’t Sleep on Patient Questions About Wide-Awake Surgery

Practical pearls from your colleagues.

Joseph Rosenbaum, MD, clinical director of hand surgery at Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, N.J., is a longtime and enthusiastic practitioner of the Wide-Awake Local Anesthesia No Tourniquet (WALANT) technique for outpatient hand surgeries. We took a deep dive into the technique with him in our December 2024 Sports Medicine Special Online Edition.  

Of course, many patients are surprised and, in some cases, anxious to hear they would actually be wide awake for their hand surgery. So Dr. Rosenbaum developed a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document about WALANT surgery that he shares with his patients after he broaches the topic.

The one-page FAQ proactively and definitively answers three typical questions in an easy-to-understand, patient-centric manner:

• What is WALANT?
• Why would I want to have WALANT surgery?
• Anything else I should know?

Download and review the full document. OSM