Anesthesia Care, Practice and Safety
Care and Practice
Anesthesiologists serve a central role in the operating room, making decisions to protect and regulate critical life functions. They typically are the first to diagnose and treat any medical problems that may arise during surgery or the recovery period. The practice of anesthesiology is broad and transcends the operating room as well. Anesthesiologists are experts in pain medicine. They help patients with chronic disease live better lives through pain management treatments. Additionally, their work in critical care units saves countless lives. Anesthesiologists treat patients with multiple complications, from pulmonary and cardiac issue to infection control and advanced life support.
Safety
Complications from anesthesia have declined dramatically over the last 50 years. Since the 1970s, the number of anesthesiologists has more than doubled and at the same time patient outcomes have improved. While perioperative deaths attributed to anesthesia were approximately 1 in 1,500 some 50 years ago, today that number has improved nearly 10-fold. Despite older and sicker patients being treated in operating rooms nationwide, this is a dramatic increase in patient safety. At present, the chances of a healthy patient suffering an intraoperative death attributable to anesthesia is less than 1 in 200,000 when an anesthesiologist is involved in patient care. (Committee on Quality of Healthcare in America, Institute of Medicine, To Err Is Human, Building a Safer Health System. Edited by Kohn L., Corrigan J, Donaldson M. Washington, National Academy Press, 1999, p 241).
Read more about this topic: American Society Of Anesthesiologists (ASA)
Famous quotes containing the words practice and/or safety:
“If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever- present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)
“For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman;... but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)