Indicators of anesthesia safety and quality.

In 1999, the Institute of Medicine shocked the world by claiming that medical error was among the leading causes of death in the United States. In contrast, anesthesiology was cited as an area in which there have been impressive gains in safety and quality. The mechanisms to which these impressive gains have been attributed include practice guidelines, anesthesia simulators, and benchmarking. Unfortunately, the current literature offers little evidence that these systematic approaches to patient safety have resulted in measurable improvements in quality, but efforts continue in the development of traditional and non-traditional quality indicators.