This may be analogous to the practice of anesthesiology in which improvements in medical technology have led to increased anesthetic management of older patients with significantly more concurrent disease.” With this increased aircraft density comes increased danger, thereby offsetting potential improvements in safety.
Technology has made it possible to meet production pressures of the commercial airline industry by allowing more takeoffs and landings with less separation between aircraft. This may be due to the effect that improved safety technology has had on air traffic density.
Lagasse compared anesthesia to the aviation industry: “The safety of airline travel, for example, has increased dramatically in this century, but since the 1960s there has been minimal improvement in fatality rates. Lagasse wrote, “We must dispel the myth that anesthesia-related mortality has improved by an order of magnitude. However, Lagasse’s anesthesia-related mortality rate of 1 per 13,176 surgeries was significantly different that the Institute of Medicine’s rate of 1 death per 200,000-300,000 surgeries. When mortality was defined as anydeath occurring within 48 hours following surgery, there were 351 deaths in 184,472 surgeries–an overall surgical mortality rate of 1 death per 532 cases.ĭeaths related to anesthesia errors were much less–only 14 deaths out of 184,472 surgeries–a rate of 1 death per 13,176 cases. Lagasse presented data on surgical mortality from two academic New York hospitals between the years 19.
Lagasse of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York published a study in Anesthesiology, the specialty’s leading journal, which challenged the Institute of Medicine report. When mortality is defined as any patient who dies within 48 hours following surgery, the statistics are much different. However, this conclusion that anesthesia mortality has plummeted is not universal.
These statistics reflected the frequency of all patients, healthy or ill, who died in the operating room. In this report, the Committee on Quality of Health Care in America stated that, “anesthesia is an area in which very impressive improvements in safety have been made.” The Committee cited anesthesia mortality rates that decreased from 1 death per 5,000 anesthetics administered during the 1980s, to 1 death per 200,000-300,000 anesthetics administered in 1999. In 1999 the Institute of Medicine published their report entitled To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health Care System.
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