Faculty Bibliography

OBJECTIVE: Representatives of five international critical care societies convened topic specialists and a nonexpert jury to review, assess, and report on studies of targeted temperature management and to provide clinical recommendations. DATA SOURCES: Questions were allocated to experts who reviewed their areas, made formal presentations, and responded to questions. Jurors also performed independent searches. Sources used for consensus derived exclusively from peer-reviewed reports of human and animal studies. STUDY SELECTION: Question-specific studies were selected from literature searches; jurors independently determined the relevance of each study included in the synthesis. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS: 1) The jury opines that the term "targeted temperature management" replace "therapeutic hypothermia." 2) The jury opines that descriptors (e.g., "mild") be replaced with explicit targeted temperature management profiles. 3) The jury opines that each report of a targeted temperature management trial enumerate the physiologic effects anticipated by the investigators and actually observed and/or measured in subjects in each arm of the trial as a strategy for increasing knowledge of the dose/duration/response characteristics of temperature management. This enumeration should be kept separate from the body of the report, be organized by body systems, and be made without assertions about the impact of any specific effect on the clinical outcome. 4) The jury STRONGLY RECOMMENDS targeted temperature management to a target of 32 degrees C-34 degrees C as the preferred treatment (vs. unstructured temperature management) of out-of-hospital adult cardiac arrest victims with a first registered electrocardiography rhythm of ventricular fibrillation or pulseless ventricular tachycardia and still unconscious after restoration of spontaneous circulation (strong recommendation, moderate quality of evidence). 5) The jury WEAKLY RECOMMENDS the use of targeted temperature management to 33 degrees C-35.5 degrees C (vs. less structured management) in the treatment of term newborns who sustained asphyxia and exhibit acidosis and/or encephalopathy (weak recommendation, moderate quality of evidence).

Patients are most at risk during transitions in care across settings and providers. The communication and reconciliation of an accurate medication list throughout the care continuum are essential in the reduction in transition-related adverse drug events. Most current research focuses on the outcomes of reconciliation interventions, yet not on the clinician's perspective. We aimed to explore clinicians' cognitive processes and heuristics of making sense of patients' disease histories. We used the affinity diagram method to simulate real-life medication reconciliation with 24 clinicians. The participants were given paper cards with diseases and medications representing a real case from an anesthesiology department. The task was to sort the cards in a set that made sense to the clinician. The experiment was video-recorded, and the data were analyzed using a quantitative spatial analysis technique. Levene's test for equality of variance showed that 79% of the 24 participants arranged the diseases along a straight line (p < 0.001). With only few exceptions, the diseases were arranged along the line in a fixed order, from cardiac conditions to depression (Friedman's chi(2) (44) = 291.9, p < 0.001). We learn from this study that although clinicians employ a variety of coping strategies while reconciling patients' medical histories, there are common reconciliation strategies. Understanding heuristics and the mental models clinicians have for the reconciliation process may help to develop and implement methods and tools to promote safety research and practice.

OBJECTIVE: Predictions about the future impact of technologic and process innovations inspire optimistic visions. Optimism and speculation require a counterweight. Because results often do not turn out as expected, anticipating failure is useful, and anticipating unintended consequences is visionary. MEASUREMENTS: A history of unfulfilled prognostications was explored with the intent of finding something essential to the complexities of medicine. Do missed predictions signal another side to innovation that also helps us uncover new information about our world? MAIN RESULTS: Serendipity is an important theme in medical innovation. There is no reason to think this will change. Things do not necessarily go as planned, but often the results are as important as the original prediction was supposed to be. It will not be clear where we end up until we get there. CONCLUSIONS: Ideal goals are useful but speculative and subjective. There in fact might be several ideals and contingency is important. The detours and incidental stops on the way to an ideal are more fruitful than the goal itself.

STUDY OBJECTIVE: To compare the Mapleson D circuit and the bag-valve-mask device for mask ventilation of patients undergoing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). DESIGN: Cross-over study. SETTING: Single-center academic medical center. PATIENTS: 18 patients undergoing ECT for major depressive disorder. INTERVENTIONS: Patients were randomized to undergo mask ventilation by the Mapleson D circuit or the bag-valve-mask device. MEASUREMENTS: End-tidal CO(2), seizure duration, and airway pressure values were recorded. MAIN RESULTS: End-tidal CO(2) was significantly lower with the bag-valve-mask device. When compared with the bag-valve-mask device, ventilation with the Mapleson circuit resulted in rebreathing of CO(2) in nearly all patients, shorter expiratory time, and lower pressure ramp slope. CONCLUSIONS: Hypocapnia was not associated with longer seizures, and the user-device interaction might affect device performance.

The acutely septic patient is a multifaceted challenge for the anesthetist. Unlike most elective surgery patients, acutely septic patients have severe systemic disease before the physiologic insults of anesthesia and surgery. The decision to operate is usually informed by the urgent or emergent need to correct a severe surgical problem and weighed against the higher risks of morbidity and mortality from the procedure itself. The care of the septic patient in the intensive care unit can help guide operating room management. However, the acuity and time course of intraoperative events, including hemorrhage and drug-induced shock states, compel the anesthetist to respond aggressively with therapies that may or may not be strongly substantiated with long-term data in the intensive care unit setting. The anesthesiologist must place considerations concerning short-term survival from the acute insult of surgery ahead of longer-term considerations.

OBJECTIVES: We report on a human factors evaluation project at a major urban teaching hospital that was intended to use human factors methods to assist the selection of a new infusion device among 4 commercially available models. METHODS: The project provided an expert evaluation of the pumps, collected data on programming each pump by a sample of practitioners, tabulated recent adverse event reports in the US Food and Drug Administration Manufacturer and User Device Experience database, and observed actual use in intensive care and hematology/oncology units. RESULTS: Programming by clinicians showed no correlation between clinical experience and ability to program any of the pumps under consideration. Field observations reflected diverse use patterns across services that required ease of use pumps did not offer. Upon review of a final candidate pump, purchasing preferences superceded clinical considerations. CONCLUSIONS: Equipment and systems that are intended for use by clinicians must necessarily reflect an understanding of actual clinical practice to be well suited for use at the sharp (operator) end. However, purchase decisions for medical equipment including infusion devices are typically made by hospital staff members who are experienced in administrative and clinical matters but have no expertise in the evaluation of complex equipment. This project demonstrates how collaboration by human factors and clinical professionals can inform equipment decisions and assist clinician performance to improve patient safety. It also reveals how technical decisions that directly influence anesthesia staff performance and patient safety are subject to organizational factors such as social and political pressure.