Mortality Related to Anesthesia and Sleep Deprivation in Medical Doctors

To the Editor:—The article of Lienhart et al. 1 must be applauded. Because of the authors’ careful and high-quality methodology, this work—begun in 1996 and covering an entire nation—was able to estimate anesthesia-related mortality in France. This work confirms the critical role of cardiac disease, aging, emergency care and hemorrhage in mortality related to anesthesia. Perhaps more importantly, the authors illuminate the importance of human error. In at least 98% of cases, one episode of substandard practice was identified, and in more than half of the cases, four deviations from accepted practice were recorded. The authors acknowledge that their analysis probably underestimated the true incidence of such system error. Production pressure was a factor in 20% of the events, but despite their belief that errors may occur more frequently during urgent and stressful care, the authors do not mention the role, if any, of a night shift or call, the night of or the 48 h before the accident. Several recent articles have linked fatigue in anesthesia with medical errors, but because anesthesia deaths are rare events (according to the survey, occurring in less than 1 of 100,000 cases) and despite a rigorous methodology, analysis were unable to demonstrate a link between night shifts and anesthetic or intensive care mortality. Because of the authors’ sample size and their careful analysis, the study could have provided a unique opportunity to analyze the role of sleep deprivation in the genesis of anesthesia accidents. It would have been of interest to know whether this could have played a role in mortality related to anesthesia.