Checklists, checklists everywhere! Love them or hate them, since the introduction of the WHO surgical safety checklist there has been a tsunami of checklists affecting clinical areas of a hospital near you. Whilst there is good evidence that the WHO surgical safety checklist has been effective at improving patient safety, this same does not necessarily apply for the day surgery cannulation checklist-bundle branded QI by infection control. Much of the criticism raised cites poor construction and inclusion of irrelevant items, resulting in checklist fatigue and poor compliance. In this podcast we speak to Dr Ashley de bie Dekker, whose PhD work involves the construction of intelligent dynamic checklists, aimed at integrating patient data from multiple sources to produce context-sensitive and patient specific checklists.
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Decisions, decisions, decisions... BJA Podcast with Paul Greig
Imagine you are sitting on the runway, waiting to take off to your holiday destination. As you begin to taxi the pilot announces that there is an engine warning light flashing, but that in his experience this almost always amounts to nothing and both him and co-pilot have made a pragmatic decision to proceed, given that the flight was already running late. In anaesthesia, one of the most fundamental decisions we take is whether or not to anaesthetise someone, something that can be relatively simple or profoundly complex given the circumstances. However, there are situations you would think that as a body of responsible professionals we would all agree on. Research from Oxford suggests that this may not be the case and that there is in fact a good deal of difference of opinion, particularly when it comes to matters of patient safety. In this podcast we talk with lead author Paul Greig about his interesting and thought-provoking work looking at risk tolerance in anaesthetists.
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Ketamine Kids
Children requiring urgent but simple surgery is a common place phenomenon that can sometimes wreak havoc on the best planned emergency list. Operating on children in an urgent capacity can be logistically difficult outside tertiary centres and is not help
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Perioperative Medicine: today, tomorrow and the future of teamworking
There has been an increasing realisation that the majority of complications from high risk surgeries are not due to technical failings in either the operating theatre or anaesthetic room, but from medical complications occurring out on the wards. 'Failure to rescue' has become part of critical care lexicon and with it, an awareness of the financial burden associated with treating morbidity associated with high risk surgeries. Over the last three years there has been an explosion of interest in perioperative medicine both as a solution to this problem and as a means to improving the quality of surgical care experienced by all patients. Accompanying the article on the multi-disciplinary team approach to the high risk surgical patient published in this month's BJA, Dr David Walker, director of the Masters programme in perioperative medicine at UCL, addresses some of our hopes, fears and maps out a possible future for this exciting new speciality.
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DAS unanticipated difficult intubation guidelines 2015 overview with Dr Chris Frerk
Dr Chris Frerk, chair of the airway guideline group talk about the updated 2015 DAS guidelines. 11 years after the publication of the original, the new guidelines reflect technical advances in airway management over the last decade as well recognising the important role of human factors in crisis resource management. Dr Frerk explains the principles, rationale and evidence for this superbly constructed document that will become the fundamental basis of airway management for present and future generations of anaesthetists.
The BJAs free podcasts will take listeners on a tour of the world of anaesthesia; interviews with authors and commentaries from key experts on featured articles, plus hot topics in anaesthesia research and practice will be published with each issue.
South Africa