AANA journal
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In 1978, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), developed a generic anesthesia equipment preuse checklist. The checklist was first released by the FDA in August 1986 and endorsed by the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists on October 18, 1986. The FDA checklist was revised in 1992 to improve the abilities of anesthesia providers to detect machine faults. ⋯ Use of the FDA machine checklist was no more effective than the provider's usual method in discovering machine faults. When using their normal method, 54.5% of providers did not discover more than 50% of programmed faults. Approximately 40.9% of providers who used the revised FDA checklist did not discover over 50% of programmed faults.
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Safely operating life support equipment and evaluating new technology both require some basic understanding of measurement theory. Measurement errors fall into two main categories: systematic errors (predictable problems usually due to calibration) and random errors (unpredictable). These two types of errors can be quantified by experiments involving repeated measurements of standards or "true" values. ⋯ The third step is to calculate basic descriptive statistics, such as the mean and standard deviation. Finally, the data should be presented in graphic form with the differences plotted against the reference values and including numerical values for the calculated error intervals. The key idea to remember is that device evaluation and method agreement studies are based on the desire to know how much trust we should place in single measurements that may be used to make life support decisions.