Anesthesia Core Quality Metrics Consensus Delphi Study

Background: Improving anesthesiology care and perioperative outcomes is a growing field encompassing quality improvement and quality assurance, research, and continuing medical education. Multiple consensus initiatives have standardized perioperative endpoints. However, no standard set of metrics exist to evaluate the quality of Canadian anesthesiology care delivery.

Objective: Develop a ranked list of up to 20 metrics, which can be used to evaluate the quality of anesthesia, perioperative care, and acute pain management for adult inpatient non-cardiac surgical patients for use in quality improvement and quality assurance, research, and continuing medical education in the Canadian care context.

Methods: First, the steering committee will conduct a scoping review of the literature to identify candidate metrics, according to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR) and Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for scoping reviews. Metrics will include patient-reported outcome and patient-reported experience measures, quality and safety indicators, process metrics, and Canadian Anesthesiologists' Society recommended practice standards. The search strategy will include English-language articles published or in use within the past seven years (2015/Jan-2022/March) in 1) MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, Web of Science, and Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2) grey literature, including guidelines, and 3) existing evaluation metrics used by Canadian departments for quality assurance and improvement. Screening and data extraction will be performed by two independent reviewers using Covidence.

Next, following approval from the Research Ethics Board and with written informed consent from participants, a multidisciplinary panel of anesthesiologists, people with lived surgical experience (patients, caregivers), surgeons, nurses, internal medicine and family physicians, hospital administrators, and researchers will iteratively review the list of candidate metrics using a modified Delphi process. Independent voting, using surveys over three rounds, will be used to identify the most important metrics to define the quality of anesthesia, perioperative care, and acute pain management. Additional cycles may be performed if required.

Inclusion criteria

• Patient/family participants must have undergone a surgical experience within the past three years, and have the capacity to provide informed consent.
• All other participants must be actively practising in Canada in the disciplines they represent.

Exclusion criteria

• Participants with self-declared conflicts of interest with this project.