Risk management and anesthesia

Risk management in Anesthesia is a crucial part of patient safety. Because anesthesia care is usually considered as facilitative rather than therapeutic, the outcome of anesthesia care has traditionally been measured in terms of the absence of ‘complications’. Consequently, anesthetists have been at the forefront of clinical risk management. It can be described in five stages as follows: risk awareness, risk identification, risk assessment, risk management, and re-evaluation. By identifying the strong points and the weakest points in concurrent health systems; policies and procedures can be implanted in order to ensure effective risk control. If applied correctly and not limited to compelling statistics, risk management can be a powerful, highly beneficial aid to our practice.