How to avoid this common anesthesia mistake

Mistakes during anesthesia can have dire consequences. Darci Palmer, BS, LVT, VTS, explains one common anesthesia mistake and how to avoid it. Plus, she shares tips for avoiding math mistakes.

View the video below for the entire discussion. The following is a partial transcript.

Darci Palmer, BS, LVT, VTS: Probably the most common preventable anesthetic related mistake is just leaving the popoff valve closed. And that's a lot of the times due to the fact that people are not pressure checking their anesthesia machines appropriately. So, everybody should be pressure checking their machine prior to ever use on a patient. But what a lot of people do, and it's actually not correct, is that they just remove their hand off of the end of the breathing circuit to relieve the pressure. What should be done is that the popoff valve is opened to relieve the pressure in that circuit and that test to make sure that the popoff valve is actually functioning, and the gas is go into the scavenging system at that point.