WHY DO ANESTHETISTS NEED CODES

With the increasing availability of information technology in hospital s and the introduction of medical audit and resource management, there is a proliferation of anaesthetic data collection systems. The amount of data recorded varies from a complete anaesthetic record to a small subset of it. Most systems hold data in coded form for reasons of acc uracy and compactness. Unfortunately, all the coding systems are diffe rent, making comparisons between different centres difficult. We propo se that there is a need to develop a standard national system for codi ng anaesthetic terms