Airway Leads and Airway Response Teams: Improving Delivery of Safer Airway Management?

Airway management remains a source of significant morbidity and mortality. This review considers recent summaries of complications and looks toward strategies to improve practice using a coordinated approach.

A safety gap can exist between national recommendations and local practice. A lack of attention to end tidal carbon dioxide has repeatedly contributed to airway mismanagement. Clinicians must be trained in newer airway devices (videolaryngoscopes or supraglottic airways) to use them effectively. Time must be found to teach rarely performed skills (e.g., front-of-neck access). Both larger and smaller hospitals have benefitted from an airway lead or response team, coordinating education programs, ensuring the adoption of guidelines, standardizing equipment, and recognizing the role of human factors and ergonomics.

Even in the twenty-first century, the incidence of airway-related morbidity and mortality can be reduced, by an institutionally supported, coordinated approach to the whole process of airway care.