No matter the perspective, anesthesia handoffs are problematic

Anesthesiologists have long prided themselves as being patient safety advocates. From the introduction of the pulse oximeter, adopting technologies to detect physiologic changes, and preventing incorrect equipment configurations, our specialty has a tradition of evolving to address challenges in safe care.¹ This attention to safety is credited with a decrease in anesthesia-related mortality to approximately 8 per million hospital surgical discharges.² Now, because anesthesia-related outcomes have become more expansively defined to include major postoperative complications and death days to weeks after surgery, anesthesiologists must also expand their definition of patient safety beyond the care rendered in the operating room (OR).