Patient and surgery factors associated with the incidence of failed and difficult intubation

Abstract

Estimates of the rate and risk-factors for difficult airway rarely include a denominator for the number of anaesthetics. Approaches such as self-reporting and crowd-sourcing of airway incidents may help identify specific lessons from clinical episodes, but the lack of denominator data, biased reporting and under-reporting does not allow a comprehensive population-based assessment. We used an established state-wide dataset to determine the incidence of failed and difficult intubations between 2015 and 2017 in the state of Victoria in Australia, along with associated patient and surgical risk-factors. A total of 861,533 general anaesthesia episodes were analysed. Of these, 4092 patients with d..