© The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Board of Directors of the British Journal of Anaesthesia. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournal.org
New airway equipment: opportunities for enhanced safety
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Securing the airway in a safe and timely manner is of prime importance in anaesthetic practice. This applies to both routine and difficult intubations, be they expected or unexpected. Airway management was the cause of just over half of anaesthesia-related cardiac arrests in a recent review of adult and paediatric perioperative cardiac arrests.1 A number of new airway aids and devices are available that aim to facilitate airway management. They may be broadly classified as: (i) tracheal tube guides, (ii) supraglottic devices such as the laryngeal mask airway (LMA), and (iii) indirect video-laryngoscopes (Table 1). Over the past few years, fibreoptic technology has been incorporated into airway equipment with huge potential to obtain good glottic visualization during laryngoscopy.
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A number of guides and introducers are available to facilitate passage of the tracheal tube into the trachea. Lighted stylets or ‘lightwands’ have been described as
Department of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine
Mater Misericordiae University Hospital
Dublin 7
Ireland
* E-mail: donal.buggy@nbsp.ie
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