Postoperative pain management in children: Guidance from the pain committee of the European Society for Paediatric Anaesthesiology (ESPA Pain Management Ladder Initiative)

The main remit of the European Society for Paediatric Anaesthesiology (ESPA) Pain Committee is to improve the quality of pain management in children. The ESPA Pain Management Ladder is a clinical practice advisory based upon expert consensus to help to ensure a basic standard of perioperative pain management for all children. Further steps are suggested to improve pain management once a basic standard has been achieved. The guidance is grouped by the type of surgical procedure and layered to suggest basic, intermediate, and advanced pain management methods. The committee members are aware that there are marked differences in financial and personal resources in different institutions and countries and also considerable variations in the availability of analgesic drugs across Europe. We recommend that the guidance should be used as a framework to guide best practice

Opportunism, threats, and the evolution of systematic conservation planning

Systematic conservation planning (Margules & Pressey 2000) is approaching its 25th birthday (Pressey 2002). The field has produced many hundreds of scientific publications. More important, its science is increasingly influencing the decisions of organizations (Groves et al. 2002), shaping legislation and policy (Environment Australia 2001; Reyers et al. 2007), and achieving results on the ground and in the water (Finkel 1998; Pressey 1998; Airame 2005; Fernandes et al. 2005). There is, of course, much room for improvement, but systematic conservation planning is progressively expanding its scope and perspectives and becoming more effective at synthesizing lines of thought that were previously poorly connected