> Anesthesiologists kill a lot of patients. People who are about to die often get emergency surgery, and guess which doctor the family usually meets only after

> Anesthesiologists kill a lot of patients. People who are about to die often get emergency surgery, and guess which doctor the family usually meets only after their loved one is dead? Is it easy to bump people off with anesthesia? Sure. But a whole lot of surgical complications, both expected and unexpected, get blamed on "the anesthesia". When someone dies during or immediately after surgery, it's easy to blame the surgery. But if that patient didn't have a life-threatening illness going on, they probably wouldn't have had the surgery. We don't do purely elective surgery (e.g., joint replacements - they're not "elective" as in purely optional, but as in "not getting one for a month won't kill you") on people who aren't optimized, but sometimes, you don't have time to get them into the best possible condition. A truly unexpected death is a rarity in the OR. It happens, but we've had pretty much the same suite of monitors for the past 30-35 years or so, so safety hasn't seen anything like the vast jumps it made in the 30-35 years before that. The Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation, founded 1985, was the first organization that involved multiple groups of stakeholders (clinicians, drug makers, device makers) in identifying safety risks, and they continue to review closed claims (settled or judged at trial) for possible new risks (e.g., they were able to have the drug rapacuronium withdrawn from the market because the closed-claims database functioned as a post-introduction surveillance system). Since this is about the UK, "first year of practice" means even less than it does in the US - their post-med-school path is longer and slower than here in the US and Canada.