We believe in putting our patients first, so we take pain management and patient comfort very seriously. Anesthesiology is the branch of medicine that specializes in administering drugs and other agents to cause patients to be insensitive to pain. In other words, we help patients remain as pain free as possible during their stay at the hospital. Anesthesiologists provide continuity of care for surgery patients from preoperative evaluation through postoperative care.

At Northwestern Memorial Hospital, the Department of Anesthesiology provides a full range of anesthesia services for both inpatient and outpatient procedures. In addition to intraoperative anesthesia (anesthesia given during surgery), we provide the following services:

• Inpatient and outpatient assessments
• Postoperative acute pain management
• Outpatient chronic pain management services
• Critical-care medicine services
• Obstetric Analgesia
• Anesthesia

Our Care

Our anesthesiologists provide in-house coverage 24 hours per day, seven days per week for both surgical and obstetric patients. The department is one of the busiest in metropolitan Chicago, supplying operative anesthesia services for more than 30,000 operations, approximately 60 percent of which are outpatient procedures. We also deliver epidural labor analgesia and anesthesia services to 90 percent of the patients at Prentice Women’s Hospital.