Click here to send us your feedback on any aspect of the project
The UK Difficult Airway Society (DAS) aims to improve the management of the patient's airway by anaesthetic and ciritical care personnel. The resources and algorithms on this website were presented initially to to DAS in August 2010. The work has since evolved into the National Tracheostomy Safety Project. This work has also been presented to the UK Intensive Care Society and the UK National Patient Safety Agency and we have worked with colleagues from ENT, Maxillofacial surgery, Nursing, Physiotherapy and Speech therapy to try and achieve consensus where possible and to make the project as robust and widely applicable as possible.
The background to this project involved local, regional and then national analysis of tracheostomy related critical incidents through collaboration with the NPSA. You can view presentations describing the background and evolution of the project here. These presentations were made to the DAS ASM in Cheltenham, November 2010.
We will aim to provide resources and guidance to allow patients with tracheostomies or laryngectomies to be safely cared for in our hospitals. This will incorporate
- Emergency Guidelines
- Infrastructure and equipment guidance
We have been collaborating with the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) and the UK Intensive Care Society (ICS) to ensure that the finished work is supported by as wide an audience as possible. The Royal College of Anaesthetists are also involved in helping to develop the educational resources presented here. We have also engaged ENT and the Maxillofacial Royal Colleges and our Nursing and Allied Health Professional colleagues.
We are aiming to put together a jigsaw of all of the good bits of work which exist around tracheostomy safety. This includes builing on existing published guidance such as that from the ICS and NPSA and other excellent national and local resources. There is also unpublished guidance from the NPSA which we aim to add to the resources. If you have anything that you think we should look at, please send it to us. Any comments or feedback will be considered by our working party.
The DAS propose that we present and publish these guidelines via the DAS ASM and DAS website so that we can invite a 6 month period of peer review. They will be also be linked to the ICS website. Any suggestions or comments can be fed back through the DAS website, the ICS website, or this one (click here) and at the end of the consultation period we intend to publish the guidelines in their finalised form. If your email programme can't send mail to us directly from the link above, use comments@tracheostomy.org.uk.
These pages will be regularly updated to reflect progress. You can view the content of the guidelines and algorithms by clicking on our Resources section above.
Click the image above to send us an email. Your computer's email programme may not be set up to send mail to us directly from the link above. You can write to us using: comments@tracheostomy.org.uk.
