Best practice and patient safety in anaesthesia (May 2013)

Summary

The pursuit of patient safety involves reducing the gap between best practice and the care actually delivered to patients. Understanding how to reliably deliver best practice care using established anaesthetic techniques may, today, be more important than seeking new ones. Advances in anaesthesia safety involve analysing failures and devising strategies to address these. However, anaesthetists do not work in isolation, and their contribution to the function of the multidisciplinary teams in which they work has far-reaching consequences for patient care.