Chapter 46 - Quality and Patient Safety in Anesthesia Care

Abstract

Clinical anesthesia practice is a model for quality and safety in medicine. In the 50 years since Beecher and Todd’s 1954 study of anesthesia outcomes, anesthesia-related morbidity and mortality have fallen dramatically and are now nearly unmeasurable for healthy patients. The multi pronged approach taken by anesthesiologists has included learning from empiric evidence, individual case review, analysis of outcomes to identify patterns, specialty-wide standards and guidelines, safety-focused specialty organizations, and clinical registries that allow clinicians to benchmark themselves against local and national norms. This chapter will review the development of the current quality and safety infrastructure that underlies modern anesthetic practice and discuss how each of the above approaches have contributed to making anesthesia practice incrementally safer.