The new Medical Director of ANZTADC & webAIRS
Article from NZ Anaesthesia Issue 69, August 2024.
Read the full magazine here.
Are you contributing to patient safety and enhancing the quality of perioperative care?
WebAIRS, the web-based anaesthetic incident reporting system, has collected data on over 11,700 anaesthesia related incidents across Australia and New Zealand since its launch in 2009.
Dr Yasmin Endlich, the new medical director of the Australian and New Zealand Tripartite Anaesthetic Data Committee (ANZTADC) and webAIRS hopes the platform will reach 12,000 reports by the end of this year.
“We’ve seen a significant growth in reports over the last 4-5 years” Yasmin shares. “This isn’t a rise in incidents but an increasing number of anaesthetists reporting to the webAIRS database and helping to improve quality and safety for patients across the two countries.”
WebAIRS is accessible to all members of the NZSA, ANZCA and ASA. It was established through a tripartite alliance of the three organisations and is overseen by ANZTADC, a combined committee with representatives from all three organisations and members from both countries.
Individual anaesthetists can register to webAIRS and anonymously report any incident, event, or near miss to its database. Hospitals can also register, and individuals can choose whether their report is available to their workplace’s local webAIRS administrator when they submit it.
The database is completely de-identified and reporting is voluntary. WebAIRS is also protected by qualified privilege in both New Zealand and Australia, meaning that if an incident which has been reported ends up in court the information reported to webAIRS cannot be used.
Yasmin’s first experience with webAIRS was in 2017. As the then Chair of the ACECC Airway Management Special Interest Group, she was involved in a multicentred audit; a joint project that collected incidents relating to anaesthetic airways management over six months. These incidents were reported directly through webAIRS by twelve specified centres across the two nations. Denominator data was collected as well, similar to NAP 4.
“This project was my first experience accessing webAIRS and it really highlighted how great of a tool it is. It felt like I was sitting on this treasure trove of information.” Yasmin shares. “After this project I became a member of ANZTADC, then Chair of its publication committee, and applied for the medical director role last year when Dr Martin Culwick retired.”
“New Zealand and Australia are so far away from the rest of the world and webAIRS allows us to have our own data on our own anaesthetic practice.”
“I personally see webAIRS as a safety and quality tool for anaesthetists. An event might happen so rarely that it would be once in a lifetime for an individual, and very rare for a specific centre. However, by combining it across the two countries we get bulk data and more information on this event. One example is oesophageal intubations. There are a couple of media reports of this occurring, and a couple of coroner reports but when we did a search in webAIRS we had over 100 reports. This gave us data we could analyse and learnings we could share back to our anaesthetic community.”
“The aim is that everyone who enters data also gets something back out of it. By reporting to webAIRS you’re directly feeding back into quality and safety and influencing the outcome of the current safety issues of concern.”
Anaesthetists can also collect CPD points within category practice evaluation for reporting to webAIRS at two points per hour of reporting. The time collected is both the time to enter the incident (this only takes a few minutes) and the time involved in collecting the data and reflecting on it.
Yasmin’s vision is for webAIRS to become an integral part of daily anaesthetic practice through a healthy culture of reporting incidents and near misses. Anaesthetists can also use the website as a resource they visit regularly to read new advisory notices or recent reports.
“I also want to encourage more of our trainees and registrars to join webAIRS. There is so much they can gain from webAIRS during their training. As well as reporting and reading about incidents, it can also be a huge help with exam preparation. You’re learning from someone else’s experiences when you’re talking about incidents and how they are managed.”
Trainees can use webAIRS as part of the trainee scholar role. If the required ANZCA criteria is fulfilled, trainees can use webAIRS data as part of their audit and quality improvement project. They can collect their own data or work with their hospital’s local webAIRS administrator. More developments are in the pipeline that will benefit all users of webAIRS too. In the future, reporting will capture the reporting country and will collect patient ethnicity.
“It takes time to collect data but in 3-5 years we will be able to see if there’s any clear differences between the two nations and have new insight into potential differences for minority groups.”
“I am also in the initial stages of discussing developments to the website and ways we can make the output of data even more accessible. The data is really fascinating and making reports even more available for anaesthetists will be beneficial. We can see trends from over 15-16 year periods alongside topical trends as they are emerging. Each report is reviewed as it comes in and reporters can tag their reports to alert us of a potential safety issue. We saw the benefits of this recently when a number of incidents were reported with delayed gastric emptying associated with GLP1- agonists. One of our analysts was able to look at these and is in the process of preparing a submission back to our community.
If you’re interested in registering with webAIRS visit their website: http://www.anztadc.net
Or if you’re interested in getting involved with data analysis you can contact Yasmin and the ANZTADC team at anztadc@anzca.edu.au
