Anaesthesia and Operative Services Centre

The Anaesthesiology Department of Dongguan People's Hospital was founded in 1957 and formally became an independent clinical anaesthesiology specialty in 1990. After decades of sustained development, it is now a modern comprehensive specialty integrating clinical diagnosis and treatment, teaching and training, and research innovation. The department is a Dongguan Key Clinical Specialty, a specialty recognised by a national drug clinical trial institution and one of the first national standardised residency training bases, and in 2024 it was selected for the Guangdong Provincial Key Clinical Specialty Construction Programme. The department has achieved notable results in talent training and research innovation. In 2019 it was approved as one of the first national pilot units for labour analgesia; in 2022 it opened an anaesthesia clinic for painless diagnosis and treatment; in March 2024 it established a pain ward, and in November of the same year it added an anaesthetic treatment clinic for refractory insomnia, continuously broadening the boundaries of its medical services and building a full-cycle comfort-focused medical service system.

Scale and facilities The Anaesthesia and Operative Services Centre has a well-developed layout, covering the anaesthesia operating rooms at Honglou and Puji campuses, pain medicine, a day surgery centre, a painless diagnosis and treatment centre and the Dongguan Key Laboratory of Anaesthesia and Organ Protection. Its work extends to all fields of clinical anaesthesia, anaesthesia recovery, an AICU (under preparation), comfort-focused medical care, pain diagnosis and treatment, anaesthetic treatment clinics, and anaesthesia and operating-room nursing, forming a large-scale, specialised pattern of development as a broad discipline.

The centre has 66 laminar-flow operating rooms and rooms for painless procedures, 6 hybrid operating rooms and 34 recovery-room beds, and provides more than 90,000 anaesthesia services a year. It is equipped with internationally advanced equipment, including Ohmeda and Drager anaesthesia machines and ventilators, video laryngoscopes, fibreoptic bronchoscopes, multiparameter monitors, a STOCKERT S5 cardiopulmonary bypass machine, continuous cardiac output monitors, blood gas analysers, colour Doppler ultrasound diagnostic systems, EEG monitors, transoesophageal cardiac ultrasound, temperature-preservation devices and high-end cell-salvage machines, laying a solid hardware foundation for surgical safety and quality of care.

Core services and specialist techniques The department's work covers four core fields: clinical anaesthesia, critical care, comfort-focused medical care and pain diagnosis and treatment. It has successively introduced comfort-focused diagnostic and treatment services including painless gastrointestinal endoscopy, painless fibreoptic bronchoscopy, painless oocyte retrieval, painless afterloading brachytherapy, painless induced abortion and labour analgesia, and is proficient in anaesthesia for complex operations such as cardiac and great-vessel surgery, thoracic surgery, major abdominal surgery and neonatal surgery. It also performs precise, minimally invasive pain diagnosis and treatment techniques, including spinal cord stimulation, percutaneous balloon compression for trigeminal neuralgia and fully implantable intrathecal morphine pumps.

At present the department has developed a number of specialist techniques that it describes as leading in the field, mainly including cardiothoracic anaesthesia (including thoracic surgery with preserved spontaneous breathing and cardiac surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass); ultrasound-guided nerve block with multimodal PCA analgesia; protection of vital organ function in elderly patients; and blood conservation for critically ill emergency surgical patients. These techniques safeguard patients' safety and comfort during diagnosis and treatment.

Staff and team development The department has a well-structured, highly skilled and experienced professional medical and nursing team, currently with 258 medical, nursing and technical staff. Among the doctors, 8 hold full senior professional rank, 20 hold associate senior rank and 34 hold intermediate rank. The team includes 2 doctoral supervisors, 4 master's supervisors and 1 collaborating postdoctoral supervisor, and has 2 Dongguan Leading Medical Talents, 3 Dongguan Distinguished Doctors and 2 Outstanding Young Medical Talents of Dongguan Public Hospitals. As an authorised doctoral and master's training site of Southern Medical University, an authorised master's training site of Jinan University and Guangdong Medical University, and a postdoctoral research station of Southern Medical University, it has built a core platform for training high-level anaesthesiology professionals.

Research and innovation achievements The department has strong research capability. It has completed specialty registration as an institution for national clinical trials of medicines and medical devices and has been approved to establish the Dongguan Key Laboratory of Anaesthesia and Organ Protection. It has undertaken nearly 40 registered drug clinical trials (GCP) in total, including 17 clinical trials of Class I innovative drugs, has led 3 national research projects, 4 provincial projects and multiple key municipal research projects, and has received research funding of more than RMB 13 million.

Its research output has been substantial. It has received 1 second prize and 2 third prizes of the Dongguan Science and Technology Progress Award, 1 Innovation Dongguan Science and Technology Progress Award and 1 Hospital Pharmacy Science and Technology Award of the Guangdong Pharmaceutical Association. Over the past 5 years, staff have published more than 40 SCI-indexed papers as corresponding author or first author in internationally recognised journals including Nature Microbiology, Nature Communications, Hepatology and ISME Journal; 5 of these papers were published in journals with an impact factor above 10, and the highest impact factor of the journal of a single paper exceeded 30. The department contributed to the Chinese Expert Consensus on Thoracic Spinal Nerve Root Block Therapy (2024 edition), obtained 1 national invention patent and 7 utility-model patents, achieved 1 transfer of research results into application, and published 9 professional books, using research innovation to support the high-quality development of clinical care.