[Registration of activities at Norwegian anesthesia departments]

Documentation and quality control of anaesthesiologic activity based on electronic data processing is less than optimal in Norwegian departments of anaesthesia. Major efforts have been made to register and store information in large data bases. It has been difficult, however, to put the collected data to practical use. The Norwegian Association of Anaesthesiologists has developed and distributed a data program, NAFREG, which is designed to take care of a minimum set of basic data to serve our needs. In order to obtain data of relevance to quality, a special code list has been developed to facilitate registration of problems related to anaesthesiologic activity. NAFREG has been in use for more than three years, and has been distributed to more than 30 hospitals in Norway. The article evaluates the registration system as practised in six hospitals participating in an evaluation project.