British journal of anaesthesia
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Editorial Review
Safety improvement requires data: the case for automation and artificial intelligence during incident reporting.
The reporting of incidents has a long association with safety in healthcare and anaesthesia, yet many incident reporting systems substantially under-report critical events. Better understanding the underlying reasons for low levels of critical incident reporting can allow such factors to be addressed systematically to arrive at a better reporting culture. However, new forms of automation in anaesthesia also provide powerful new approaches to be adopted in the future.
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Cerebrovascular autoregulation is defined as the capacity of cerebral blood vessels to maintain stable cerebral blood flow despite changing blood pressure. It is assessed using the pressure reactivity index (the correlation coefficient between mean arterial blood pressure and intracranial pressure). The objective of this scoping review is to describe the existing evidence concerning the association of EEG and cerebrovascular autoregulation in order to identify key concepts and detect gaps in the current knowledge. ⋯ There is a paucity of studies evaluating the link between EEG and cerebrovascular autoregulation. The studies identified included a variety of EEG and cerebrovascular autoregulation acquisition methods, age groups, and diseases allowing for few overarching conclusions. However, the preliminary evidence for the presence of an association between EEG metrics and cerebrovascular autoregulation prompts further in-depth investigations.
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Unravelling the impact of the sex of the anaesthesia provider on the outcomes of patients requires careful statistical analysis and the validity of many assumptions. A recent study in the British Journal of Anaesthesia investigates the effect of anaesthesia provider sex on patient outcomes, using data from two academic healthcare networks in the USA. ⋯ There have been several recent studies considering the effect of healthcare provider sex on outcomes. We will discuss the interpretation of these results and the validity of the underlying assumptions.