The focus of this month's featured article is anesthesia patient safety around the world. Anesthesia professionals in all countries face unique challenges to providing safe perioperative care. Leaders of anesthesia societies from 13 countries around the globe provide insights into the major issues they encounter that impact perioperative patient safety. The countries range from low-middle income to high-income countries. The issues range from a simple lack of basic anesthetic drugs and monitors to complex concerns about maldistribution of qualified anesthesia professionals and an increasing trend towards criminalization of medical errors. Despite the significant resource differences between these 13 countries, they all share common issues. These include challenges related to implementation of national standards of intraoperative care and surgical checklists, establishment of cultures of safety and teamwork, extension of safety efforts into the perioperative period, and initiatives to detect and prevent death from perioperative deterioration from infection, cardiac dysfunction, and respiratory complications. These challenges provide a roadmap for national societies and members of global collaborations to use when prioritizing resources to address opportunities to improve anesthesia patient safety in the coming decade.
Mark A. Warner, MD, Daniel Arnal, MD, Daniel J. Cole, MD, Rola Hammoud, MD, Carolina Haylock-Loor, MD, Pedro Ibarra, Acad, MD, MSc, Muralidhar Joshi, MBBS, MD, Fauzia A. Khan, FRCA, Konstantin M. Lebedinskii, DSc Med, Jannicke Mellin-Olsen, MD, DPH, Katsuyuki Miyasaka, MD, PhD, Wayne W. Morriss, MBChB, Bisola Onajin-Obembe, FWACS, PhD, Robinson Toukoune, MMed, and Patricia Yazbeck, MD
Cover art composed by
Naveen Nathan, MD
Cover Editor and Illustrator