Code of Practice: Perioperative Care

This Code of Practice (CoP) focuses on a state-of-the-art process of perioperative care. It serves as a guideline for the correct organization of the surgical process for all animal species (excluding fish, reptiles and amphibians). The aim is to reduce the risk of acute and chronic pain for the animal, faster recovery, fewer unwanted infections, fewer complications, less spread in and better quality research data. State-of-the-art peri-operative care is therefore a form of refinement. Moreover, it is likely that the reproducibility of a procedure (internationally) will increase with the same set-up, which may reduce the number of animal procedures.