Anaesthesia is at the forefront of error reduction in medicine. It has been said that the anaesthetist's working environment has much in common with high risk, high technology fields such as the aviation and nuclear power industries. It is characterised by high dynamism and uncertainty, time pressure, ill formed problems, complex human machine interactions and risk. Modern anaesthesia is very safe but problems and mistakes do occur (often with no consequences for the patient); reports of these should be disseminated to prevent reoccurrence.

This project involved analysis of the changing incident reporting practices in anaesthesia and the participatory design of a prototype reporting system for the North West of England.

See details of the system

See the publications from this project

The Project Team