Anaesthesia Incident Monitoring Study

The "critical incident technique" was described by Flanagan in 19541, when it was used to reduce loss of military pilots and aircraft during training. Jeffry Cooper in 1978 introduced it into anaesthesia as a method to study errors during administration of anaesthesia2 • He defined a critical incident as an occurrence that could have led (if not discovered or corrected in time) or did lead to an undesirable outcome, ranging from increased length of hospital stay to death or permanent disability. The "critical-incident" technique was first used to study anaesthesia-related problems in Australia (Townsville) in the early 1980s3,4. Subsequently, incident reporting systems were introduced at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney5 and at the Royal Women's Hospital in Melbourne6• The Australian Patient Safety Foundation (APSF) was set up to co-ordinate the Australian Incident Monitoring Study (AIMS) which involved participation of a wide range of hospitals throughout the country7.8.