Abstract
Anesthesia is a medical system that involves anesthesiologists, surgeons, nurses, pharmacists, and the anesthesia machine. Many latent risks remain in anesthesia. To err is human, and human error plays a central role in anesthesia mishaps. Therefore, reducing human error is the important issue in lessening critical incidents. One of the most common sources for revealing mishaps is the incident report. Incident reporting highlights problems in anesthetic practice and complements our quality of anesthesia induction. Reported incidents give information in the development of anesthesia mishaps to individual anesthesiologists, however, awareness of potential problems may not prevent the occurrence of incidents. Organizational intervention should be the major preventive strategy for reducing human errors. This paper reviews the terms related to risk management, strategies for preventing human errors, and the key points for reducing mishaps in clinical anesthesia.
