Code of Practice: Perioperative Care

Published in 2022, this CoP focuses on state-of-the-art perioperative care. It is a guidance document for organising the perioperative process for all animal species (excluding fish, reptiles and amphibians), aiming to reduce the risk of acute and chronic pain, unwanted infections and complications. State-of-the-art perioperative care can also accelerate recovery, decrease the dispersion of study data and produce higher-quality data. A state-of-the-art perioperative care process is thus a form of refinement. Moreover, standardisation of perioperative care is likely to increase the reproducibility of experiments, contributing to the reduction of animal testing.