News

Author: Guy Haller Introduction Patients expect anaesthesia not only to prevent the pain and discomfort of surgery but also to respect their needs and, most importantly, to be safe.1 Many patients fear complications, particularly unconsciousness, brain damage or death.2 In response, anaesthetists have learnt through training and experience to deliver anaesthesia safely, to monitor and adapt to changes in physiological parameters, and to anticipate and manage critical situations during the pre-,...

Author: Argyro Zoumprouli On Sunday, June 4th, 2023, during Euroanaesthesia 2023 in Glasgow, the Patient Safety and Quality Committee (PSQC) of the European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care (ESAIC) held the Patient Safety Experts Meeting, inviting participants from ESAIC, other international societies and industry partners. The Patient Safety Experts Meeting is a unique opportunity for experts worldwide to openly discuss the most current issues in patient safety in perioperative car...

Author: Andrew Smith The ESAIC has been running the PRiPSAIC (Peer Review in Patient Safety in Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care. The project’s aim was to create a number of patient safety peer-review networks in 4 European countries, train participating anaesthesiologists in evaluating patient safety using the methodology and visit process used in the Helsinki Declaration implementation evaluation project (1) and thereby share knowledge and experience in patient safety. In April 2022, the pr...

Author: Basak Ceyda Meco, Joana Berger-Estilita, Karina Jakobsen, Finn M. Radtke ‘How are our patients doing in the postoperative period?’ This query should constitute a vital inquiry within the realm of safety metrics.   Anaesthesiology has been a pioneering discipline in patient safety for decades, demonstrating sustained and progressive efforts in propagating fundamental standards and guidelines relevant to the patient safety domain.(1) Moreover, in recent decades, healthcare systems ha...

Grenoble, France 11 – 12 May, 2023 Faculty: Dr Daniel Arnal, Madrid, Spain Dr Julien Picard, Grenoble, France Dr Stefan Gisin, Switzerland ESAIC held the fifth edition of our Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Crisis Simulation Masterclass in May: Helsinki Declaration through High Fidelity Simulation. During the COVID crisis, we innovated this course to be one of the few simulation events that could take place online, attracting participants from Australia, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and extensively...

Author: David Whitaker, Guttorm Brattebø Improving patient safety is a very demanding and complex challenge, and despite years of numerous initiatives from many stakeholders, patients are still being hurt in health care.1 The view on avoiding unnecessary harm has changed from targeting the individual health care provider towards a broader perspective. Still, we often use the word error, which we should be more careful of using.2 Sometimes, when investigating the contributing factors of an adver...

Author: Jannicke Mellin-Olsen It is no coincidence that the first stakeholder mentioned in the Heads of Agreement of the Helsinki Declaration on Patient Safety in Anaesthesiology (1) is patients:   “Patients have a right to expect to be safe and protected from harm during their medical care and anaesthesiology has a key role to play improving patient safety perioperatively…..  …Patients have an important role to play in their safe care which they should be educated about and given...

Author: Benedikt Preckel In anaesthesiology – as in other medical specialities – we learn from what goes wrong. We register complaints, incidents and adverse events and try to learn from them and improve our management. This is most frequently called a Safety-I approach: clear guidelines and protocols have been developed to agree on unambiguous working methods and thus increase patient safety. And we have to admit that patient safety has greatly improved thanks to Safety-I!  Yet, we als...

Authors: T.E. Martin, Ina Schmidt, Douglas Stevens A report on safety issues in aeromedical transport is included in this newsletter on different Patient Safety topics. This field of acute medicine is yet an under-researched area of medicine, and the medical staff has to deal with a series of patient safety issues. The report “Circling the SQuARE: Patient Safety in Long Haul Air Ambulance Operations” provides a thought-provoking overview of the complex landscape of patient safety in...

Authors: Daniel Arnal, Maria Wittmann “ChatGPT” is an artificial intelligence (AI)-based large language model (LLM) trained on massive text datasets in multiple languages with the ability to generate human-like responses to text input (1).   Developed since 2018 (2), the release of “ChatGPT” to the broader public in November 2022 (1) and its later dissemination seemed to bring an available artificial intelligence (AI) tool with astonishing potential. Most end-users had been reading ab...