Concepts of safety reporting

The historical progression from Imhotep’s Edwin Smith papyrus, to Nightingale’s studies of Crimean deaths and their causes, through to Gravenstein’s mid-1980s description of early ‘‘automated anesthesia records’’ parallels the progression in types of reporting systems from hieroglyphics on papyrus, to graphs on paper, through to electronic records. But apart from these functional distinctions, these diverse examples share similar concepts, which, if appropriately applied, can help structure reporting systems. In this volume of the Journal, Munting et al. describe a reporting system used in a department of anesthesia at a tertiary referral university hospital in Holland. While this paper illustrates several concepts about reporting of importance for Canadian anesthesiologists, we focus on four: