Safety culture and crisis resource management in airway management: general principles to enhance patient safety in critical airway situations

Airway management is a cornerstone of patient safety in anaesthesiology and in emergency and critical care medicine. Deficiencies in airway management could have catastrophic results for the patient. In anaesthesia patients, in particular, a high level of safety should be expected. It has been proven in other high-risk and complex industrial fields that obtaining very high levels of safety requires special strategies and safety philosophies in order to guarantee long-term low-risk production. The concept of safety culture has invaded many industries, more recently including medicine. Concepts of the high reliability organizations (HROs) are now ready to be adapted to medicine and offer promising improvements in health care. This paper applies some of the HRO principles to airway management and illustrates how to transform more general strategies to practical application in the clinical world. This includes the use of key elements of crisis resource management (CRM) and the development of a checklist for safety in airway management.