Video Classification of Intubation in Spain (Pediatrics)

The clinical importance of airway management has gained relevance over the last decade in most scientific societies with the objective of improving the standard of care.

The WHO has focused its guidelines on "Safe Surgery," aiming to encompass all methods that predict and recognize the risk of difficult airway management or aspiration, which must be applied by the surgical team. To this end, it has created and implemented a surgical safety checklist that can be useful in reducing the risk of unidentified difficulties.

The same suggestion has been included in the Helsinki Declaration on Patient Safety in Anesthesiology, endorsed by most European entities in cooperation with the European Society of Anesthesiology (ESA), the European Board of Anesthesiology (EBA-UEMS), the World Federation of Societies of Anesthesiology (WFA), and the European Patients' Federation (EPF). The protocol for difficult airway management and the implications of the Helsinki Declaration were published in 2013 in the Spanish Journal of Anesthesiology and Resuscitation.

Airway management today is perhaps the field that most concerns anesthesiologists, as decisions and actions must be taken quickly and effectively when facing a potential difficult airway (DA). Failure to do so would result in significant morbidity and mortality for patients.

The incidence of difficulty in orotracheal intubation (OTI) ranges between 1.5% and 13%. Most errors in airway management are due to ignorance and the low reliability of traditional protocols, algorithms, and combinations of detection tools to identify a potentially difficult airway.