[Principles of fast track surgery. Multimodal perioperative therapy programme].

Recent evidence has documented that a combination of single-modality evidence-based care principles into a multimodal effort to enhance postoperative recovery (the fast track methodology) has led to enhanced recovery with reduced medical morbidity, need for hospitalisation and convalescence. Nevertheless, general implementation of fast track surgery has been relatively slow despite concomitant economic benefits. Further improvement in postoperative outcome may be obtained by developments within each care principle with a specific focus on minimally invasive surgery, effective multimodal, non-opioid analgesia and pharmacological stress reduction.