The official podcast of the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF) is hosted by Alli Bechtel, MD, featuring the latest information and news in perioperative and anesthesia patient safety. The APSF podcast is intended for anesthesiologists, anesthetists, clinicians and other professionals with an interest in anesthesiology, and patient safety advocates around the world.
The Anesthesia Patient Safety Podcast delivers the best of the APSF Newsletter and website directly to you, so you can listen on the go! This includes some of the most important COVID-19 information on airway management, ventilators, personal protective equipment (PPE), drug information, and elective surgery recommendations.
Don’t forget to check out APSF.org for the show notes that accompany each episode, and email us at [email protected] with your suggestions for future episodes. Visit us at APSF.org/podcast and at @APSForg on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
A dental chair shouldn’t be a place where safety standards slip, yet that’s the reality Dr. Rita Agarwal lays out with unsettling clarity. We talk through why office-based dental sedation and dental anesthesia can slide into dangerous territory: unclear definitions, uneven training, inconsistent monitoring requirements, and a system that often can’t even tell you how many serious complications occur.
Dr. Agarwal, a pediatric anesthesiologist and longtime patient safety advocate, traces how dentistry and medicine evolved along parallel anesthesia paths, then explains what happens when those paths don’t share the same safeguards. We discuss the tragic story of six-year-old Caleb Sears and how “someone will be monitoring” can mean very different things across settings. From oral anxiolysis to deep sedation and general anesthesia with drugs like propofol and opioids, the episode highlights the moment risk spikes: when ventilation fails and no one in the room is trained, equipped, and empowered to rescue.
We also get practical about what reduces harm right now: smarter patient selection (especially with comorbidities like obstructive sleep apnea or cardiac disease), consistent terminology that reflects the true depth of sedation, and an independent anesthesia professional whose only job is caring the patient. Finally, we dig into the dental anesthesia data problem and why reporting adverse events and near misses is the foundation for real systems change.
If you care about patient safety, perioperative monitoring, and preventing clinical deterioration in any outpatient setting, listen through and share your take. Subscribe, share this episode with a colleague, and leave a review so more clinicians and families can find it.
For show notes & transcript, visit our episode page at apsf.org: https://www.apsf.org/podcast/320-dental-anesthesia-safety-gaps-part-1/
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