Chapter 48 - Quality and Patient Safety in Anesthesia Care

Abstract

Clinical anesthesia practice is a model for quality of care and patient safety in medicine. The contributions of anesthesia providers to current quality and safety practices include extensive standardized case summaries that identify potential safety signals, more focused attention to human-device interactions, establish specialty-wide standards, and initiate closed-claims investigations with organizations specifically dedicated to patient safety such as the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF) and Anesthesia Quality Institute (AQI). This chapter chronicles the evolution of patient safety practice in anesthesia and identifies specific contributions that have improved patient safety and care. The current structure/process/outcome classification scheme for assessing and measuring quality of care and the quality/safety tools that have developed such as Plan/Do/Study/Act (PDSA), root cause analyses, and large database analyses are reviewed.