Dr Neha Singal and Dr Manoj Sharma develop a database for reviewing the quality performance of anaesthetists at the medium-sized district general hospital Luton and Dunstable hospital in the UK.
Background
The NHS Next Stage Review report ‘High Quality Care for All’ aims to make organisations accountable for quality through a focus on the measurement and reporting of quality indicators representing safety, effectiveness, and patient experience. [1] Anaesthetic services are no exception to the requirements. Clinical indicators are increasingly developed and promoted by professional organisations and government agencies as measures of quality and performance. Guy Haller et al identified 108 key performance indicators out of a big systemic review of the published articles. [5]
Perioperative mortality and serious morbidity has decreased significantly over the past 50 years, which is also influenced by a range of patient and surgical factors. The quality of anaesthetic care can be more directly assessed in the immediate postoperative period, in which the patient’s experience of recovery is closely linked to the quality of the anaesthetic. Two of the most important dimensions of quality of recovery in the postoperative period are postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV) and postoperative pain. [2] PONV and incisional pain during recovery has a strong negative influence on patient satisfaction and are among the most undesirable complications from the patient’s point of view. [2]
From: Using quality indicators in anaesthesia: feeding back data to improve care Br J Anaesth. 2012;109(1):80-91. doi:10.1093/bja/aes173
It was a challenge to develop a database for reviewing the quality performance of anaesthetists at a medium-sized district general hospital such as Luton and Dunstable hospital. Metrics collected during the immediate post-anaesthetic recovery period, such as patient temperature, patient-reported quality of recovery, pain and nausea provide potentially useful information for the anaesthetist, yet this information is not routinely fed back. [4] Reviews of the effects