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WHO’s World Patient Safety Day in 2022 (Saturday, 17 September) will focus on improving medication safety. The European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care (ESAIC) fully endorses this initiative and highlights that it first promoted medication safety back in 2010 as part of its ‘Helsinki Declaration on Patient Safety in Anaesthesiology’, signed by all anaesthesiology […]

Prof. Guy Haller The ESAIC is currently developing an extensive Patient Safety education programme, Safer Care to Save Lives. The ESAIC Essential Patient Safety Course (EPSC) is one part of this programme. It will be an online course aimed at providing key knowledge on patient safety. It is built on the basis of the overarching principles […]

Prof. Jannicke Mellin-Olsen ESAIC will be organising its first World Patient Safety Awareness week from 12 until 19 September 2022, coinciding with the celebration of World Patient Safety Day on 17 September. On this occasion, Marie-Hélène Lattes interviewed Dr Jannicke Mellin-Olsen, ESAIC Patient Safety and Quality Committee member and the driving force of the Helsinki […]

Alex Rawlings ESAIC Patient Safety and Simulation Project Manager As we start to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, we have a golden opportunity to shape our practice for the future. With PRiPSAIC, the ESAIC takes the next step after the Helsinki Declaration on Patient Safety in Anaesthesiology. PRiPSAIC works with industry partners, national societies of […]

Alex Rawlings ESAIC Patient Safety and Simulation Project Manager When faced with the problem of continuing valuable simulation training during the pandemic, the ESAIC had to look for innovative solutions.  We had previously collaborated with Madrid’s University Hospital of Alcorcón, and its experienced high-fidelity simulation centre IDEhA, for the 2017 ESAIC Simulation Masterclass on Procedural […]

Alex Rawlings ESAIC Patient Safety and Simulation Project Manager The ESAIC Advanced Patient Safety Course is a new live course to teach patient safety tools to use in acute settings. We offer modern teaching using interactive group work and innovative 360-degree videos of key scenarios, followed by debriefing, to bring examples of critical situations to […]

Daniel Arnal, Maria Wittmann ESAIC Patient Safety and Quality Committee It’s been ten years since the EUSOS study publication that highlighted a higher postoperative mortality than expected in Europe (4%) and a high variability between countries1. According to the European Commission, between 8% and 12% of patients admitted to hospitals in the EU suffer from […]

Prof. Peter Kranke  ESAIC Guidelines Committee Chair For many years the European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care (ESAIC) has been strongly supporting the development of high-quality, evidence-based guidelines as a tool to harmonise and improve clinical practice in anaesthesia, perioperative medicine, intensive care, emergency medicine as well as pain therapy throughout Europe. These guidelines […]

Gabriel M.Gurman, MD Chief Editor This subject is far from being esoteric. It is an integral part of medicine in general, and especially of anaesthesiology.  In its 1999 report “To err is human: building a safer health system”, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) published the shocking estimate that up to 98,000 annual deaths were caused […]