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
313 episodes
#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 ...
#301 Pro-Social Operating Rooms
Work stress doesn’t come only from long days and hard cases in the operating room. It also comes from the invisible rules a team lives by: who gets heard, how conflicts get handled, what “efficiency” really means, and whether anyone feels safe ...
#300 Pro-Social Teams: Safer, Faster, Kinder
The fastest way to make an operating room feel unsafe isn’t a broken monitor, it’s a team that stops acting like a team. We dig into pro-social behavior: the small, voluntary actions that support other people and the group, including kindness, ...
#299 Cannabis And Anesthesia
Cannabis has gone mainstream, but perioperative risk has not improved. THC products are far more potent than they were decades ago, emergency room visits are climbing, and many patients still walk into surgery thinking that it’s safe. We want a...
#298 New APSF Brain Health Guidance For Older Adults
Postoperative delirium is one of the most common adverse events after surgery for older adults, and it can change a patient’s recovery, independence, and quality of life. We take a practical, evidence-focused look at what anesthesia teams can a...
#297 From OR To ICU: How Checklists And Clean Hands Save Lives
Transfers don’t have to feel like controlled chaos. We break down how to move a critically ill patient from the OR to the ICU with confidence by pairing structured handoffs with disciplined infection prevention—so information moves seamlessly w...
#296 How We Build Safer Anesthesia Teams, One Trainee At A Time
A small air bubble, a missed monitor cue, a late call for help—tiny moments that can change everything. We sit down with Dr. Max Feinstein to unpack how real-world anesthesia education builds safer clinicians, why attention is our most precious...
#295 From OR To YouTube: What Happens When Patient Safety Meets Digital Storytelling
Curiosity can change a career—and a field. We sit down with pediatric cardiac anesthesiologist and creator Dr. Max Feinstein to trace how a love of ethics, a pandemic schedule, and a phone camera evolved into a mission to make anesthesia safer ...
#294 From Video Laryngoscopy To ECMO: What Keeps Airway Management Safe
When air meets uncertainty, judgment matters most. We dig into the evolving landscape of airway management where video laryngoscopy, supraglottic devices, and even ECMO promise better outcomes, yet cognitive errors and non‑OR settings still acc...
#293 Reimagining Anesthesia With AI, Wearables, And Safety Culture
What if the anesthesia workstation could see trouble coming and stop it before it starts? We explore how anesthesia moves from reactive to predictive by blending AI, medical-grade wearables, and closed loop systems with a strong safety culture....
#292 Forty Years Of Obstetric Anesthesia Progress And The Work Ahead
Maternal safety has never mattered more, and the stakes span far beyond the delivery room. We revisit four decades of progress in obstetric anesthesia—from safer neuraxial techniques and airway strategies to medication safeguards—and then get h...
#291 Managing Anesthesia Risks for Patients with Acute and Chronic Cocaine Use
A cocaine-positive patient rolls into the OR and the monitors look fine—until twenty minutes after induction, when the blood pressure plummets. We unpack that swing from sympathetic surge to sudden crash through two real cases: an emergent trau...
#290 From Blind Needles To Ultrasound: The Safety Revolution In Regional Anesthesia
A remarkable safety story runs through regional anesthesia, from the era of blind needle placement to a modern practice guided by real-time ultrasound, lipid rescue, and reliable team checklists. We walk through the key milestones that cut comp...
#289 Forty Years Of Anesthesia Medication Safety: What Works And What’s Next
A single syringe swap should never decide a patient’s fate. We pull back the curtain on forty years of anesthesia medication safety to show what truly works—then tackle the hard part: getting proven safeguards into every OR, every time. From lo...