Anesthesia Patient Safety Podcast
The official podcast of the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF) is hosted by Alli Bechtel, MD, featuring the latest information and news in perioperative and anesthesia patient safety. The APSF podcast is intended for anesthesiologists, anesthetists, clinicians and other professionals with an interest in anesthesiology, and patient safety advocates around the world.
The Anesthesia Patient Safety Podcast delivers the best of the APSF Newsletter and website directly to you, so you can listen on the go! This includes some of the most important COVID-19 information on airway management, ventilators, personal protective equipment (PPE), drug information, and elective surgery recommendations.
Don't forget to check out APSF.org for the show notes that accompany each episode, and email us at podcast@APSF.org with your suggestions for future episodes. Visit us at APSF.org/podcast and at @APSForg on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Episodes
326 episodes
#326 Corneal Abrasions After Surgery
Eye pain in the PACU can trigger a reflex page to ophthalmology, but that reflex is not always the safest or most efficient choice. We provide considerations for perioperative corneal abrasions including why most are superficial epithelial inju...
#325 APSF Podcast Takeover: The HSSIB with CEO Dr. Rosie Benneyworth From The Medical Safety Podcast
A patient gets harmed, everyone wants answers, and the system too often responds with blame, silence, or a slow-moving inquiry that arrives years after the frontline has moved on. Today, we are hosting a special podcast takeover show from The M...
#324 Endotracheal Tubes Are Not All The Same
Your airway cart might look fully stocked, but one quiet change can reshape an entire intubation: a different endotracheal tube brand, a new material formulation, a redesigned cuff, or changes in diameter measurements. We take a close, practica...
#323 How Technology Can Speed Training And Strengthen Anesthesia Patient Safety
Your first day in anesthesia can be overwhelming with so many numbers, dials, alarms, and decisions that all land at once, and the stakes are high. We sit down with Dr. Lahiru Amaratanga to ask a simple question with big implications for anesth...
#322 Designing Safer Anesthesia
The fastest way to improve anesthesia patient safety is often to stop asking people to be perfect and start redesigning the world they work in. Dr. Alli Bechtel sits down with Dr. Lahiru Amaratunge, a consultant anesthetist in Melbourne, to unp...
#321 Safer Dental Anesthesia, PART 2
A dental office can feel low-stakes until the moment it isn’t. We pick up our conversation with Dr. Rita Agarwal to talk about the real-world safety gaps in dental sedation and dental anesthesia, especially for children, and the practical steps...
#320 Dental Anesthesia Safety Gaps, PART 1
A dental chair shouldn’t be a place where safety standards slip, yet that’s the reality Dr. Rita Agarwal lays out with unsettling clarity. We talk through why office-based dental sedation and dental anesthesia can slide into dangerous territory...
#319 Four New Studies That Change Daily Anesthesia Safety Decisions
Ketamine for emergency intubation has a reputation for hemodynamic stability, but does the best evidence back that up when your patient is truly sick? Today, we walk through four fresh research summaries that sharpen day-to-day anesthesia patie...
#318 Air Embolism Alert
Air embolism is one of those complications that feels impossible right up until it happens fast, quietly, and with life-altering consequences. We walk through the FDA’s 2025 Early Alert on the Watchman access system for left atrial appendage oc...
#317 Setting Expectations For Safer Cesarean Anesthesia with Dr. Ruthi Landau Revisited, PART 2
Many patients walk into labor and delivery picturing a birth day, not an operating room, and that mismatch is where preventable suffering can start. We sit down with Dr. Ruthi Landau to get practical about cesarean delivery anesthesia, with a f...
#316 Safer C-Section Pain Control Revisited, PART 1
If you’ve ever heard “it’s just pressure” during a C-section and felt your gut twist, you’re not alone, and it may be a patient safety issue hiding in plain sight. We sit down with Dr. Ruthi Landau, the Virginia Apgar Professor of Anesthesiolog...
#315 Pain During Cesarean Delivery
Pain during cesarean delivery is not “just pressure,” and it is not rare. We dig into why inadequate pain control during C-section remains underrecognized even as patient-reported data suggest it may be one of the most common anesthetic complic...
#314 PACU Corneal Abrasion Protocol
Eye pain in the PACU can feel like an automatic page to ophthalmology, but it doesn’t have to be. We break down postoperative corneal abrasions on the show today. We share practical, clinician-ready guidance drawn from a multidisci...
#313 Individualized Multimodal Analgesia
“Opioid-sparing” sounds like an automatic win until you look closely at what replaces the opioids. We take on one of the toughest questions in modern anesthesiology: how do we reduce opioid-related harm without trading it for medication interac...
#312 Hantavirus Readiness For Anesthesia Teams
A virus can feel “far away” right up until it lands in a preop bay with a fever, abdominal pain, and a story that only makes sense weeks later. We walk through what anesthesia, perioperative, and critical care teams need to know about hantaviru...
#311 From Cable Chaos To One Step Airway Access
Twenty-two steps to reach an airway is not a quirky workflow problem, it’s a patient safety problem. We’re turning our attention to a neuro-interventional radiology (Neuro IR) suite where cables, monitors, and a poorly positioned anesthesia mac...
#310 Moisture Matters In Anesthesia Circuits
Condensation in an anesthesia circuit looks harmless until it starts skewing flow sensor readings or creating the kind of warm, wet environment where microbes can thrive. We pick up the story after the investigation into moisture and mold conce...
#309 Mold Risk In Anesthesia Workstations
Black particles in a breathing system are the kind of finding that makes every anesthesia professional stop and look twice. We’re sharing what a large health system uncovered after concerns for mold and moisture accumulation surfaced inside cer...
#308 We Break Down The Latest Evidence On Safer Anesthesia Care
Delirium, pain, and prolonged ventilation can feel like “expected” bumps in perioperative care until you look closely at the data. We walk through four recent APSF In the Literature reviews and pull out what’s actually actionable for anesthesia...
#307 Perioperative Safety In Low And Middle-Income Countries
The world has the knowledge to make anesthesia safer, but too often it’s the basics that are missing where the need is greatest. We’re talking about perioperative patient safety in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where a smaller share...
#306 Venezuelan Ancestry Anesthesia Alert
Catastrophic neurologic injury after a routine anesthetic is the kind of signal that stops you in your tracks, and that’s exactly why we’re talking about new perioperative recommendations for patients with maternal Venezuelan ancestry. We’ve se...
#305 Lead Infinitely
The fastest way to weaken patient safety isn’t a missing checklist, it’s a team that stops trusting each other. We dig into “infinite anesthesia” and the next step, “leading infinitely,” a practical relational leadership approach designed to bu...
#304 Infinite Anesthesia Is Not Unlimited Propofol
Workforce shortages and rising demand are squeezing perioperative teams from every side and that pressure can turn colleagues into rivals. We push back on that mindset and explore a different way to think about the future: “infinite anesthesia,...
#303 Measles in the OR
Measles can walk into your OR before the rash ever shows up, and that’s what makes perioperative measles planning so high stakes. We break down the timing that drives everything: incubation, the contagious window from four days before rash onse...
#302 Reusable Versus Single-Use Airway Devices When Seconds Count
A difficult airway is hard enough in a modern hospital. Now imagine managing it on a ship, far from resupply, where “availability supersedes preference” and a device that worked last month might quietly drift out of spec. That’s the tension we ...