Episode #271 Empowering Patients: The Key to Safer Anesthesia

Hello and welcome back to the Anesthesia Patient Safety Podcast. My name is Alli Bechtel, and I am your host. Thank you for joining us for another show. We are continuing to cover the excellent articles from the June 2025 APSF Newsletter. This week we are continuing our theme from last week, the role of patient engagement in patient safety. We have even more exclusive content. We’ll be hearing from the patient representative on the APSF Patient Engagement Workgroup. So, stay tuned.

Before we dive further into the episode today, we’d like to recognize BD, a major corporate supporter of APSF. BD has generously provided unrestricted support to further our vision that “no one shall be harmed by anesthesia care”. Thank you, BD – we wouldn’t be able to do all that we do without you!”

Our featured article today is once again “Patient Engagement: The Cornerstone of Patient Safety” by Maria van Pelt and colleagues. To follow along with us, head over to APSF.org and click on the Newsletter heading. The first one down is the current newsletter. Then, scroll down until you get to our featured article today. I will include the link in the show notes as well.

To kick off the show today, let’s meet our patient representative. Here she is now.

[Vonda] “ Hi, my name is Vonda Vaden Bates. I’m a patient advocate in the patient engagement work group for the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation. I’m based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

[Bechtel] I asked Vonda why she feels so passionate about this area? Let’s take a listen to what she had to say.

[Vonda] “In 2012, my husband went into the hospital quite unexpectedly for an insidious brain bleed, required a craniotomy, and the surgical team very, very promptly addressed that issue. As he was recovering in the hospital for 13 days and moving through his rehabilitation, he developed a blood clot in his leg, and we didn’t understand that the symptoms that he was experiencing and describing were related to that fatal pulmonary embolism that would take his life.

What I did is I reflected back on that time, and I realized that we were very engaged in his care and we asked all the questions we knew to ask, and the practitioners were attentive and kind. And so I had to ask what might be missing here? And part of what was missing was the intersection of engagement with education.

And that’s what I feel like this committee is working towards. We’re interested in hearing from patients about what questions they have when they’re approaching surgeries, especially related to anesthesia, but we’re also interested in helping raise awareness and encouraging those questions and finding ways to create articles and landing pages that are informative in real time for patients so that they’re both going in with the questions that patients have identified are important, as well as questions that the providers know to be important, and bringing these two pieces into the equation. In my hope, my hope is that it will benefit the entire efforts of the care team, of the care systems and the patients and their family members toward a very safe environment, and hopefully avoid some of the complications that can be lasting.”

[Bechtel] Thank you to Vonda for discussing her passion for patient engagement and patient safety.

Let’s return to the article to talk about the Patient Guide to Anesthesia and Surgery. Check out Table 1 in the article for the content overview. If you haven’t seen the Patient Guide yet, this is what you will find.

The first category is Understanding Anesthesia with these important questions:

• How safe is anesthesia? Common fears & concerns
• What are the types of anesthesia?
• What drugs are used in anesthesia?

The next category is Presurgery Considerations with these questions:

• Is surgery necessary?
• How do I pay for surgery?
• How do I prepare for surgery?

Another category is risk assessment and the questions from patients is,. “what are risk factors for surgery?”

Moving down the table, the next category is Post-surgery pain with the questions:

• Will I feel pain after surgery?
• How do I speed up healing after surgery?

A big area for questions and patient engagement is Pain management which includes these questions:

• What are the types of pain?
• What should I know about pain management?
• How can I manage pain without medications?
• What nonopioid medications are used in pain management?
• What opioids are used in pain management?
• What are the risks of using opioid medications?

Finally, there are some additional important questions that patients can use during their preoperative visits:

• Questions to ask your anesthesia professional
• Questions to ask your surgeon

This guide is designed to provide more than just information to patients. The ultimate goal is to encourage patients to be active participants in their healthcare journey throughout the perioperative period. There may even be steps that they can take before the morning of surgery to help minimize perioperative risk and complications. This is a big step towards patient empowerment and patient safety.

We are going to hear from the patient representative again. I also asked Vonda what she envisions for the future when it comes to patient engagement and patient safety. This is what she had to say.

[Vonda] “ 13 years. It’s given me a lot of time to look at progress and there has been quite a bit of progress over time since I first started paying attention to patient safety in 2012. Moving forward, is it the future? And what that holds. I am imagining that there can be real time engagement with the patients and the care teams that create just the right information to make sure that there’s informed consent along the way by the patient, as well as all the information provided that would give those caregivers what they need to do. Right. To be safe on behalf of that patient and providing that real time information that’s based on real inputs that have been given by patients and reviewed diligently from professional anesthesia, anesthesiologists, as well as other care providers gives me hope that every surgery can. Be looked at through the lens of that particular patient in that particular environment at that particular time, and that we are drawing on what we know from the generalizations and we are also meeting the patient exactly where that patient is with the technologies that we have available to us at this time.”

[Bechtel] Thank you so much to Vonda for contributing to the show today. We are looking forward to the future with incorporating available technology and real-time patient engagement to provide safe and quality patient care.

There is another member of the APSF family and the Patient Engagement Working Group that we are going to hear from today. Thank you to Della Lin for helping to contribute to the show.

[Della Lin] “ Thank you, Allie. I’m Della Lin. I’m a practicing anesthesiologist in Honolulu, Hawaii, and on the board of the APSF.”

[Bechtel] I asked Della how she first got interested in patient safety and patient engagement. Let’s take a listen to what she had to say.

[Della Lin] “It was about, um, 20 years ago I was in a room with many others wanting to make a difference in patient safety. Listening to Don Berwick. What he said, and I’m gonna paraphrase, was, during healthcare touchpoints between hospitals and patients. Between clinicians and patients. Patients are not the visitors to hospitals. We are visitors in their lives. Wow. This flipped my frame. It made sense. It’s not just about treating patients, it’s about stepping into their lives. So whether it’s a project to fill a gap in patient education materials like this work, or if it’s the patient, I will be anesthetizing tomorrow. Patient engagement is a fundamental principle for me and the frame of being a guest in our patient’s lives.”

[Bechtel] I also asked Della to share how patient engagement became a focus for the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation and how these resources can be used by anestheisa professionals, members of the surgery team, and anyone on the perioperative team. Here is her response.

[Della Lin] “Three years ago, the APSF Board made a specific strategic decision to increase our focus on patient engagement. For me, this means we are on a continuous path to co-design with our patients. It is no longer the paternalistic mindset of doing things to patients. It’s not even the stewardship service goal of doing things for our patients.

It’s really and truly about co-designing with our patients. So, wherever we can, every day, we need to seek the voice of the patient. We need to pause before we implement a policy or procedure. Has there been a patient voice? Have we really listened? What can the listener do? What’s likely not intuitive about these APSF patient engagement resources is how they are a resource for us, the anesthesia professional, the surgeon professional, any clinician in this space.

Usually, you know, we see resources, glance briefly at them, make sure there’s no misinformation, and then we make them available to our patients through URL, links, brochures, videos. What our clinician listeners should take advantage of is how there has been a really distinct, robust, continuous process of utilizing data analytics and other things to find out the why, the how, the what that patients need.

The problems they’re trying to solve and where they currently are going to try to meet that need. Our materials continuously go through layers of both clinician and patient review, as well as assessing accessibility and understanding. So what this can mean to you, the listener, is we have done a lot of the homework for you, the language we use, the frame of the responses, the infographics that we have created.

Take advantage. Go beyond just sharing with your patients. Take the time yourselves to look, to read, to adopt these dynamic resources for yourselves. The more we can reach, understand, and meet patients where they are, the better.”

[Bechtel] Thank you so much to Della for contributing to the show today. This is such an important call to action. The APSF’s Patient Guide to Anesthesia and Surgery is not just for patients and we hope that you will use this resource to better meet your patients where they are. And we’d love to hear from you. Are you using this resource in your preoperative clinic or have you shared the Patient Guide with your anesthesia department or surgery and nursing colleagues? What was the response? Send us an email at [email protected] to share your story of patient engagement and you might be featured on an upcoming podcast episode.

If you have any questions or comments from today’s show, please email us at [email protected]. Please keep in mind that the information in this show is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical or legal advice. We hope that you will visit APSF.org for detailed information and check out the show notes for links to all the topics we discussed today.

Have you checked out the other APSF Patient Safety Resource initiatives? Head over to ASPF.org and click on the Patient Safety Resources heading. The first one down, right above this podcast, is Initiatives. From here, you can check out the following:

• Look Alike Drug Vials
• Continuous Blood Pressure Monitoring
• Surgical Fires – A Preventable Problem
• Workplace Violence Prevention
• Drug-Drug Interactions
• And the Covid perioperative resource center.

So many great initiatives to help improve anesthesia patient safety.

Until next time, stay vigilant so that no one shall be harmed by anesthesia care.

© 2025, The Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation