Perspectives on quality and safety in pediatric anesthesia

Organizational culture underlies every improvement strategy; without a strong culture, a change, even if initially successful, is short lived. Changing culture and improving quality require commitment of leadership, and leaders must play an active and visible role to articulate the vision and create the proper environment. Quality-improvement projects require a consistent framework for outlining a process, identifying problems, and testing, evaluating, and implementing changes. Wake Up Safe is a patient safety organization that strives to use quality improvement to make anesthesia care safer. Root cause analysis is a methodology in safety analytics based on a sequence of events model of safety.