Complications and Emergencies Flashcards
What is an accident?
- Avoidable incident
What is an incident?
- Event which could cause severe risk to staff or patient
What is an emergency?
- Life-threatening event
What are the 5 different types of errors?
- Technical factors
- Organisational and supervision factors
- Environmental factors
- Personnel factors
- Human factors
What are technical factors?
- Errors occur as a result of technical or equipment failures
What are organisational and supervision factors?
- Caused by the organisation, individual, team, medications and delivery systems, physical environment and technical environment
What are environmental factors?
- Lighting, noise, smells, clutter and room layout
What are personnel factors?
- Miscommunication between individuals or when information is incomplete or unavailable
What are human factors?
- Attentional failures
- Memory failures
- Rule-based mistakes
- Routine violations
What are the 4 types of complications?
- Equipment
- Respiratory
- Cardiovascular
- Other (vomiting, hypothermia)
Why do complications occur?
- Side effects of anaesthetic agent/drugs
- Pre-existing conditions
- Secondary to surgical procedure
- Poor anaesthetic management
- Inappropriate depth of anaesthesia
What does the pre-anaesthetic assessment include?
- Clinical history
- Clinical examination
- Signalment
- Procedural considerations
- Anaesthetic considerations
- Other considerations
List some equipment failures
- Lack of oxygen in cylinders
- Disconnection of piped oxygen supply
- Stuck or missing one-way valve
- Leaks in anaesthetic system or machine
- Ventilator failure
How do you if the CO2 absorber is exhausted?
- Absorber should turn colour when exhausted
- If absorber not changed quickly, can return back to original colour, which could lead to potential hypercapnia
List some endotracheal tube complications
- May become blocked by blood, mucous or saliva
- May be kinked or twisted
List some APL valve complications
- Can accidentally be shut off in the closed position, which causes pressure to build up in the system, which leads to overinflation of the reservoir bag
- This result in barotrauma
List some vaporizer complications
- Filling vaporiser with the wrong agent
- Sticking of the dial
- Underfilling the vaporiser can lead to the patient waking up intra-operatively
- Tilting the vaporiser can lead to overdosing the patient
What may cause a delayed recovery?
- Hypothermia
- Hypoglycaemia
- Electrolyte disturbances
- Impaired circulation
- Impaired ventilation
- Drugs
- Medical conditions
What is a laryngospasm?
- Occurs in cats when the laryngeal tissue is irritated by intubation, which leads to n airway obstruction
How are laryngospasms prevented?
- Spray with local anaesthetic before intubation
- Ensure adequate anaesthetic depth
How are laryngospasms treated?
- Spray local anaesthetic
- Deepen plane of anaesthetic
- If unsuccessful, tracheostomy should be placed