It’s been a bit since a post and even longer since a podcast. Time to catch up maybe. 

This podcast is a recorded version of a talk given at the Spring Perioperative Seminar organised by the crew at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead. The brief was to talk about managing kids with challenging behaviours (keeping in mind that all too often because we provide a very challenging environment for kids).

This talk builds on this post from a while back which went up around the time we started trying to figure out what we should do better for kids on the autistic spectrum.

In the meantime we’ve started figuring out what we should do and trying to focus on making some steps. It’s very much a work in progress but the ideas are there (though it’d be good to gather tips from others).

Working on this takes a crew. Not necessarily as cool as this crew.

Anyway, here are your links. You can get straight to the player here.

Right click and choose save as to download the podcast. (That’s control-click if you’re on a trusty Mac.)

Of course you could just find the podcast over at iTunes here. If you use

And in exciting developments the podcast is now listed over at Stitcher. The show link should be here. Plus we’ve just listed with Spotify so hopefully it should turn up there soon enough.

Or the rss feed is here.

A couple of notes: a de-identified case that has been both cleared for use in teaching and presentations is mentioned in this.

The image is from unsplash.com and available for use as posted by freestocks.

Oh, and you might have noticed that somewhere in the middle of the talk I used a Voicelive Touch 2 vocal effects thing (with looping) to try and build that soundscape. Still working with that and it was pretty crazy using it live when delivering the talk but kind of fun at the same time.

There are a few papers worth a read here. For a good review this one is worth a look:

Taghizadeh N, Davidson A, Williams K, Story D. Autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and its perioperative management. Pediatr Anesth. 2015;25:1076-1084.

A review in the context of dental cases which particularly is this one:

Arnold B, Elliott A, Laohamroonvorapongse D, Hanna J, Norvell D, Koh J. Autistic children and anaesthesia: is their perioperative experience different?  Pediatr Anesth. 2015;25:1103-1110. 

The bit referenced for the Cesaroni and Garber paper comes from this:

Cesaroni L, Garber M. Exploring the Experience ofAutism Through Firsthand Accounts. J Autism Dev Disorders. 1991;21:303-313.

In a heartening development for us along the way, this paper emerged out of Great Ormond Street Hospital where a lot of the same ideas are better expressed. It is definitely worth a read though it is paywalled:

Blair J, Anthony T, Gunther I; et al. A protocol for the preparation of patients for theatre and recovery. Learning Disability Practice. 2017;20:22. 

Oh and if you got this far, maybe you have a few more minutes of spare time to spend with this truly nuts Rube Goldberg set-up. What happens when you have both lemons and even more spare time.