About The Webinar
It is an unfortunate truth that most of the significant complications that we encounter during or following an anaesthetic or surgery are predictable, and worse still that a good proportion of them are preventable. Basically far from being envitable problems caused by patient morbidity, drugs or equipment they are problems caused by the anaesthetist, surgeon or theatre team, and more specifically by human error. This webinar will look specifically at human factors in anaesthetic erros and recognition of these factors.
Errors can be made in every part of the anaesthetic and surgery process from the patient assessment and making the anaesthetic and surgery plan, through the anaesthetic and surgery themselves and into the recovery period. Common errors in surgery and anaesthesia include: misdiagnosis or missing a potential problem, not planning for likely complications, forgetting to check the patient, incorrct patient, incorrect surgical site identified/ clipped, ignoring an alarm, leaving an APL valve closed, medication error, struggling with a stressed patient, misdiagnosing the cause of a problem, forgetting a vital piece of equipment or missing a step in a process and leaving swabs or instruments inside a body cavity. A number of factors can lead reduced levels of cognitive and physical performance and subsequently induce errors; lack or knowledge, skills or experience, distraction stress, fatigue, illness, overwork, time constraints, problem patient/client, understaffing, communication problems are a few of the more commonly encountered factors. Recognising these human factors as significant barriers to effective performance is the first step in trying to reduce errors.
