• Br J Anaesth · Apr 2013

    A national survey of anaesthetists (NAP5 baseline) to estimate an annual incidence of accidental awareness during general anaesthesia in the UK.

    Two thirds of anesthesia awareness occurs before or after surgery.

    pearl
    • J J Pandit, T M Cook, W R Jonker, E O'Sullivan, and 5th National Audit Project (NAP5) of the Royal College of Anaesthetists and the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain, Ireland.
    • Nuffield Department of Anaesthetics, Oxford University Hospitals, Oxford, UK. jaideep.pandit@dpag.ox.ac.uk
    • Br J Anaesth. 2013 Apr 1;110(4):501-9.

    BackgroundAs part of the 5th National Audit Project of the Royal College of Anaesthetists and the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland concerning accidental awareness during general anaesthesia, we issued a questionnaire to every consultant and staff and associate specialist anaesthetist in the UK.MethodsThe survey was designed to ascertain the number of new cases of accidental awareness that became known to them, for patients under their direct or supervised care, for a calendar year, and also to estimate how many cases they had experienced during their careers. The survey also asked about use of monitoring designed to measure the depth of anaesthesia.ResultsAll local co-ordinators responsible for each of 329 hospitals (organised into 265 'centres') in the UK responded, as did 7125 anaesthetists (82%). There were 153 new cases of accidental awareness notified to respondents in 2011, an estimated incidence of 1:15 414, lower than the 1-2:1000 previously reported in prospective clinical trials. Almost half the cases (72, 47%) occurred at or after induction of anaesthesia but before surgery, with 46 (30%) occurring during surgery and 35 (23%) after surgery before full recovery. Awareness during surgery appeared to lead more frequently to pain or distress than at induction and emergence (62% vs 28% and 23%, respectively). Depth of anaesthesia monitors were available in 164 centres (62%), but routinely used by only 132 (1.8%) of anaesthetists.ConclusionThe disparity between the incidence of awareness as notified to anaesthetists and that reported in trials warrants further examination and explanation.

      Pubmed     Free full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

    pearl
    1

    Two thirds of anesthesia awareness occurs before or after surgery.

    Daniel Jolley  Daniel Jolley
     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…