The Department of Anesthesiology of PUMCH is among the first batch of National Key Disciplines Development Program, and the first Key Disciplines of anesthesiology as recognized by the Ministry of Education; it takes up the directorship of the National Anesthesia Quality Assurance Center, and the presidentship of the Chinese Society of Anesthesiology; it has been ranked second in the “Specialty Ranking of Chinese Hospitals” for 13 consecutive years. The Department of Anesthesiology has been practicing high-quality development strategies, which feature “advancing medicine, education, research and team management simultaneously, and marching forward together with openness and inclusivity”; the department constantly seeks to improve its healthcare capabilities and quality, boost the balance and accessibility of anesthesia services, and advance the development of a pain-free hospital with pragmatic efforts, ultimately aiming to provide people with more comfortable medical services of higher quality.

Group picture of the Department of Anesthesiology & Operating Room, PUMCH

Ensuring an Outstanding Leadership in Patient Safety with Norms and Standards

For more than seven decades, the Department of Anesthesiology has put patient safety as the first priority and has been relentlessly building and promoting a modern surgical anesthesia safety management system. Many of its innovative ideas and practices have become models replicated nationwide. In 2009, it first introduced the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist to China; in 2010, it first proposed the system for reporting patient safety incidents; in 2011, it began to implement technical specifications for perioperative rational blood use; in 2013, it was the first to establish the system of hemovigilance ; it has been increasing the application autologous blood salvage and other comprehensive blood management techniques year by year. At the opening ceremony of the Annual Meeting of the Chinese Society of Anesthesiology in 2019, Professor Huang Yuguang, as the President of the Chinese Society of Anesthesiology, put forward the development vision of building a safe, academic, quality and humanistic anesthesiology team.

The Department of Anesthesiology, PUMCH is a developer of anesthesiology guidelines and standards. Since 2010, it has authored and contributed heavily to the drafting of series of national standards on anesthetic record sheets, primary trauma care, management of narcotic analgesics in chronic pain, national anesthesia quality indicators, medical equipment configuration standard for operating department. It has also authored series of expert consensus on quality assurance in anesthesiology department, intraoperative temperature management, blood glucose management, anesthesia for pheochromocytoma patients, and prevention of postoperative cricoarytenoid dislocation, among others. In 2017, the Department of Anesthesiology guided the creation of the journal “Perioperative Safety and Quality Assurance” to improve anesthetic safety and quality and steer anesthesiology towards win-win multidisciplinary cooperation in modern medicine.

Spearheading Clinical Studies with Collaboration and Innovation

Since the 1980s, the Department of Anesthesiology, PUMCH has scored series of major accomplishments in clinical studies. It proposed generalized autoimmunity in myasthenia gravis, created the method for determining fatigue severity, and innovated diagnostic clinical immunology methods. It has led and promoted the application of the techniques of nerve stimulators for peripheral nerve blockade, patient-controlled analgesia (PCA), and blood transfusion and risk control techniques in clinical anesthesia; it has also optimized anesthesia strategies for non-cardiac surgeries in elderly patients with coronary heart disease.

The Department of Anesthesiology, PUMCH is the initiator and coordinator of multicenter clinical studies. In recent years, it has led or participated in many multicenter clinical studies, such as anesthesia related modality and prognosis of breast cancer surgeries, hypothermia prediction models, perioperative hypothermia outcome studies, protocols for rational perioperative transfusion, the epidemiological survey of chronic post-surgical pain and perioperative opioid-induced pruritus. The Department of Anesthesiology took on as the principal investigator for the phase I, II and III GCP trials of Remimazolam tosilate, a new class 1.1 anesthetics. Besides, it also completed more than ten clinical trials of various anesthetic drugs as the major co-PI or major participant. The Department of Anesthesiology, PUMCH nowadays plays an important role in international academic communities such as the International Society for Anaesthetic Pharmacology (ISAP) and the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists (WFSA).

As Prof. Yuguang Huang is now the President of the Chinese Society of Anesthesiology, and chairman of the anesthesiology committee of post-graduation medical education, Chinese Medical Doctor Association, the Department of Anesthesiology, PUMCH has taken the leading position in building a data platform connecting the National Anesthesia Quality Assurance Center with Provincial Anesthesia Quality Assurance Centers; the department also established a close communication and alliance mechanism for provincial societies of anesthesiology nationwide led by the Chinese Society of Anesthesiology, thus forming a systemic and comprehensive clinical studies network.

Driving High-quality Development with Culture and Talents

In 2022, the Department of Anesthesiology has expended the subspecialties from the existing 10 to 20. New subspecialties such as anesthesia for rare diseases, geriatric diseases, robotic surgeries, and endocrine surgeries has become the key directions. “Following closely the new trends and needs of other disciplines, we constantly seek to build a better and stronger anesthesiology team that target specific diseases to boost the high-quality development of other disciplines and the hospital overall, ultimately becoming stronger together,” said Professor Shen Le, Executive Deputy Director of the Department of Anesthesiology (presiding over work).

“The new journey ahead will be a long and glorious march towards our dreams.” The Department of Anesthesiology put forward the goals of building a safe, efficient, standardized and smooth-running platform, establishing a clinical anesthesia center and an anesthesia research center, expanding the day surgery anesthesia center and the pain-free anesthesia center, improving the preoperative assessment and postoperative recovery, pain service system, and enabling the anesthesia center to provide integrated support for the MDT of intractable, critical and rare diseases.

Text by Fu Tanpin

Picture courtesy of the Department of Anesthesiology and the Publicity Department

Translated by Liu Haiyan

Edited by Shen Le, Chen Weiyun, Wang Yao, Xiao Xiong and Chen Xiao