Handling injectable medications in anaesthesia: Guidelines from the Association of Anaesthetists.

Peri-operative medication safety is complex. Avoidance of medication errors is both system- and practitioner-based, and many departments within the hospital contribute to safe and effective systems. For the individual anaesthetist, drawing up, labelling and then the correct administration of medications are key components in a patient's peri-operative journey. These guidelines aim to provide pragmatic safety steps for the practitioner and other individuals within the operative environment, as well as short- to long-term goals for development of a collaborative approach to reducing errors. The aim is that they will be used as a basis for instilling good practice.

Implementing human factors in anaesthesia: guidance for clinicians, departments and hospitals: Guidelines from the Difficult Airway Society and the Association of Anaesthetists: Guidelines from the Difficult Airway Society and the Association of Anaesthetists.

Human factors is an evidence-based scientific discipline used in safety critical industries to improve safety and worker well-being. The implementation of human factors strategies in anaesthesia has the potential to reduce the reliance on exceptional personal and team performance to provide safe and high-quality patient care. To encourage the adoption of human factors science in anaesthesia, the Difficult Airway Society and the Association of Anaesthetists established a Working Party, including anaesthetists and operating theatre team members with human factors expertise and/or interest, plus a human factors scientist, an industrial psychologist and an experimental psychologist/implementation scientist. A three-stage Delphi process was used to formulate a set of 12 recommendations: these are described using a 'hierarchy of controls' model and classified into design, barriers, mitigations and education and training strategies. Although most anaesthetic knowledge of human factors concerns non-technical skills, such as teamwork and communication, human factors is a broad-based scientific discipline with many other additional aspects that are just as important. Indeed, the human factors strategies most likely to have the greatest impact are those related to the design of safe working environments, equipment and systems. While our recommendations are primarily provided for anaesthetists and the teams they work with, there are likely to be lessons for others working in healthcare beyond the speciality of anaesthesia.

Human factors in anaesthesia: a narrative review.

Healthcare relies on high levels of human performance, as described by the 'human as the hero' concept. However, human performance varies and is recognised to fall in high-pressure situations, meaning that it is not a reliable method of ensuring safety. Other safety-critical industries embed human factors principles into all aspects of their organisations to improve safety and reduce reliance on exceptional human performance; there is potential to do the same in anaesthesia. Human factors is a broad-based scientific discipline which aims to make it as easy as possible for workers to do things correctly. The human factors strategies most likely to be effective are those which 'design out' the chance of an error or adverse event occurring. When errors or adverse events do happen, barriers are in place to trap them and reduce the risk of progression to patient and/or worker harm. If errors or adverse events are not trapped by these barriers, mitigations are in place to minimise the consequences. Non-technical skills form an important part of human factors barriers and mitigation strategies and include: situation awareness; decision-making; task management; and team working. Human factors principles are not a substitute for proper investment and appropriate staffing levels. Although applying human factors science has the potential to save money in the long term, its proper implementation may require investment before reward can be reaped. This narrative review describes what is known about human factors in anaesthesia to date.

Implementing advance care plans in the peri-operative period, including plans for cardiopulmonary resuscitation: Association of Anaesthetists clinical practice guideline.

Contemporary guidance takes a patient-centred approach and recommends discussing and planning treatments that should be considered, not just those that should be withheld. Although some organisations and communities still use specific DNACPR (do not attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation) forms to recommend that cardiopulmonary resuscitation is not attempted, this approach has been shown to have disadvantages and is no longer regarded as best practice. The following guidelines have been produced in response to this change. They are designed to help anaesthetists, as part of the wider healthcare team, to implement and respond to advance care planning documents before and during procedures. The guidelines apply to all procedures, however minor and low risk they are considered to be, and the same ethical and legal principles apply to procedures carried out under local or regional anaesthesia and/or conscious sedation, as well as to those under general anaesthesia.

Recommendations for standards of monitoring during anaesthesia and recovery 2021: Guideline from the Association of Anaesthetists.

This guideline updates and replaces the 5th edition of the Standards of Monitoring published in 2015. The aim of this document is to provide guidance on the minimum standards for monitoring of any patient undergoing anaesthesia or sedation under the care of an anaesthetist. The recommendations are primarily aimed at anaesthetists practising in the UK and Ireland, but it is recognised that these guidelines may also be of use in other areas of the world. Minimum standards for monitoring patients during anaesthesia and in the recovery phase are included. There is also guidance on monitoring patients undergoing sedation and during transfer. There are new sections specifically discussing capnography, sedation and regional anaesthesia. In addition, the indications for processed electroencephalogram and neuromuscular monitoring have been updated.

Western diet increases wheel running in mice selectively bred for high voluntary wheel running.

OBJECTIVE: Mice from a long-term selective breeding experiment for high voluntary wheel running offer a unique model to examine the contributions of genetic and environmental factors in determining the aspects of behavior and metabolism relevant to body-weight regulation and obesity. Starting with generation 16 and continuing through to generation 52, mice from the four replicate high runner (HR) lines have run 2.5-3-fold more revolutions per day as compared with four non-selected control (C) lines, but the nature of this apparent selection limit is not understood. We hypothesized that it might involve the availability of dietary lipids. METHODS: Wheel running, food consumption (Teklad Rodent Diet (W) 8604, 14% kJ from fat; or Harlan Teklad TD.88137 Western Diet (WD), 42% kJ from fat) and body mass were measured over 1-2-week intervals in 100 males for 2 months starting 3 days after weaning. RESULTS: WD was obesogenic for both HR and C, significantly increasing both body mass and retroperitoneal fat pad mass, the latter even when controlling statistically for wheel-running distance and caloric intake. The HR mice had significantly less fat than C mice, explainable statistically by their greater running distance. On adjusting for body mass, HR mice showed higher caloric intake than C mice, also explainable by their higher running. Accounting for body mass and running, WD initially caused increased caloric intake in both HR and C, but this effect was reversed during the last four weeks of the study. Western diet had little or no effect on wheel running in C mice, but increased revolutions per day by as much as 75% in HR mice, mainly through increased time spent running. CONCLUSION: The remarkable stimulation of wheel running by WD in HR mice may involve fuel usage during prolonged endurance exercise and/or direct behavioral effects on motivation. Their unique behavioral responses to WD may render HR mice an important model for understanding the control of voluntary activity levels.

Complications of regional anaesthesia.

Regional anaesthesia can marvellously dull the pain (and limit some other complications) of trauma, surgery and childbirth. But like all powerful techniques, it may have complications. Here the complications of regional anaesthesia are reviewed. The risks, presentation and the management of these complications are discussed in turn.

Guidelines and the adoption of 'lipid rescue' therapy for local anaesthetic toxicity.

Gathering evidence from animal experiments, an editorial in this journal and published human case reports culminated in the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland recommending in August 2007 that lipid emulsion be immediately available to all patients given potentially cardiotoxic doses of local anaesthetic drugs. This development offered an opportunity to track the adoption of an innovation by anaesthetists in the UK and to gauge the effects of guidelines. Two surveys, each of 66 NHS hospitals delivering acute care within London and its penumbra, examined the adoption of lipid emulsion therapy. After the publication of the editorial in autumn 2006, the spread of 'lipid rescue' was rapid. The timing of the adoption and the impetus for innovation varied substantially between the sampled hospitals. When the formal guidelines were published, approximately half of the hospitals surveyed did not have lipid rescue. Of those that subsequently adopted it, half attributed their decision to the guidelines. At the end of 2007, there remained a small number of hospitals that had yet to adopt lipid rescue. Lipid rescue's adoption by anaesthetists in the UK offers a rare example of swift uptake of an innovation. National guidelines accelerated the adoption of innovation by some hospitals.

Use of steady state kinetic methods to elucidate the kinetic and chemical mechanisms of retroviral proteases.

Despite the current plethora of structural data of HIV-1 protease and the availability of potent inhibitors, whose structures are based in part on the presumed mechanism of action of this enzyme, our actual understanding of its chemical mechanism has been until now based largely on the precedents of the mammalian and fungal aspartic proteases and static three-dimensional data. The available steady state kinetic data of the protease, as reviewed here, constitute a first step in a detailed description of the mechanism of the enzyme to complement the structural data.

Purification, characterization, and kinetic analysis of inosine 5'-monophosphate dehydrogenase of Tritrichomonas foetus.

The IMP dehydrogenase of Tritrichomonas foetus, a parasitic protozoan incapable of de novo biosynthesis of purine nucleotides, has been purified about 1000-fold to apparent homogeneity. The purified enzyme demonstrated a 20-fold higher substrate turnover rate than the pure IMP dehydrogenase from sarcoma ascites tumor cells. It has a subunit molecular weight of 58,000, aggregates to a size of 380,000 at low ionic strength, and partly dissociates to a molecular weight of 270,000 in high salt concentrations. Unlike the IMP dehydrogenase of bacteria and mammals, the T. foetus enzyme does not require K+ for activity. The analysis of initial velocity and product inhibition data is consistent with a sequential, ordered bi bi kinetic mechanism for the parasite enzyme-catalyzed reaction, in which IMP binds before NAD+ and NADH is released before XMP. This is in contrast to the partially random mechanism of the bacterial enzyme which involves the formation of an enzyme-K+-(IMP) complex. Mycophenolic acid inhibits T. foetus IMP dehydrogenase uncompetitively versus both IMP and NAD+ with an apparent Ki of 9 microM. This value, which is several hundred-fold higher than that for mammalian IMP dehydrogenase, suggests significantly different binding properties of the mycophenolic acid site in T. foetus IMP dehydrogenase, which might be amenable to specific inhibitor design.