The first practitioners of modern anesthesia needed a machine to deliver accurate
volumes of anesthetic gases, including O2, N2O, cyclopropane, ether, chloroform, and volatile inhalational agents. The first such
machine appeared in 1905.
22
Since then, the anesthesia machine has become more complicated, with greater attention
to safety. There are many reports of malfunctioning components of the anesthesia machine
leading to potential patient morbidity.
9
,
21
,
23
,
26
,
29
,
30
,
41
,
45
In 1984, Buffington et al
14
asked 190 anesthesia meeting attendees to identify five intentional faults in a standard
anesthesia machine. Only 3.4% of participants found all five faults, and 7.3% found
no faults. In a rigorous attempt to standardize the design and construction of anesthesia
machines in order to decrease morbidity and mortality, the American National Standards
Institute (ANSI) published a standard for anesthesia machines in 1979.
2
The ANSI standard directed the design of specific features of the anesthesia machine
that decrease the likelihood of misconnections or other misuse. In 1988, the ANSI
standard was superseded by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standard,
3
which has become the design reference for anesthesia machines in the 1990s.To read this article in full you will need to make a payment
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Article info
Footnotes
Address reprint requests to Peter H. Breen, MD, FRCPC, Department of Anesthesiology, University of California–Irvine, UCI Medical Center, 101 City Drive South, Orange, CA 92868
Identification
Copyright
© 1998 W. B. Saunders Company. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
