Presented September 4th, 2024 at the APSF Stoelting Conference 2024 on “Transforming Anesthetic Care: A Deep Dive into Medication Errors and Opioid Safety”
PRESENTATION MATERIALS
The Cognitive Basis for Human Error and the Best Practices to Reduce Error – [PDF]
ABOUT THE SPEAKER(S)
Joyce Wahr, MD, FAHA
Professor Emeritus, Department of Anesthesiology
University of Minnesota
Dr. Joyce A. Wahr is a Professor Emeritus of Anesthesiology at the University of Minnesota. She began her medical training at the University of Colorado, graduating in 1978. She then did two years of surgery internship at the University of Michigan, then completed a residency in Anesthesiology at University of California at San Francisco, where she was privileged to work with John Severinghaus, Ron Miller, and Mike Roizen. After two years in private practice in California, she returned to Michigan and joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1984.
Dr. Wahr was one of the first at the University of Michigan to specialize in cardiac anesthesiology, and, with her like-minded colleagues, to develop a specialized cardiac anesthesia team. She worked closely with Dr. Orringer, Chair of Thoracic Surgery, to develop a cardiothoracic intensive care team model that included surgeons, anesthesiologists, and anesthesia and surgery residents. She served as the first Director of Cardiac Anesthesiology, moving on to direct a busy Cardiac Research team from 1990-2003. During those years, the University of Michigan Division of Cardiothoracic Anesthesiology was a founding member of the Multi-Center Study of Myocardial Ischemia (McSPI), a consortium of 25 academic cardiac anesthesiology teams that enrolled over 7,000 cardiac surgery patients in a detailed outcome database.
Her primary focus is patient safety and quality. From 2007 until 2014, she served as the Chair of the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists Foundation, an organization responsible for the FOCUS Patient Safety initiative, bringing together operative nursing, perfusionists, surgeons, and anesthesiologists to tackle the issues of human error in the cardiac OR. As part of this interest, she has a deeper interest in medication safety in anesthesia and the perioperative period, having authored several papers on this subject, and co-authored Medication Safety in Anesthesia and the Perioperative Period with Alan Merry. She served as Vice-Chair for Quality and Safety in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Minnesota from 2018-2024.
