Rationale
obese, glottis
OBESE
Endotracheal intubation is the gold standard for airway management under general anaesthesia. Over the course of the past several years, video-assisted laryngoscopy (VAL) has more and more gained in importance in this field and has already found its way into the relevant guidelines for certain settings and situations like the unexpected difficult airway [While video laryngoscopes already significantly expand the field of view simply by positioning the camera, hyper-angulated blades can also accommodate significantly greater curvatures of the pharyngeal anatomy of certain patients where a direct view of the glottis plane would otherwise not be possible [VAL has tended to be superior to direct laryngoscopy in terms of safety in the studies conducted to date, but the quality of evidence based on the existing studies is still insufficient to draw definitive conclusions [A Cochrane systematic review with a total of 64 included studies concluded that primary endotracheal intubation using a video laryngoscope leads to a lower number of failed attempts in emergency scenarios, especially in patients with an expectedly difficult airway [VAL has been included in the guidelines for airway management of the respective professional societies with different recommendations. For the perioperative setting, VAL is mentioned as a back-up procedure in the German guidelines, e.g. in case of an unexpectedly difficult airway after max. two conventional laryngoscopy attempts as well as in obese patients [Going beyond the mere procedure of endotracheal intubation, i.e. inserting a tube in the trachea, this study also aims to descriptively investigate the domain of human factors in the context of critical medical interventions using the example of airway management. In general, this aspect, which examines psychological and physiological influences (among others) on process functioning, is still largely left out of anaesthesiologic research. However, a 2013 study concluded that in all cases in which anaesthesiologists had reported serious airway rescue incidents to a relevant registry, such human factors had contributed to the errors that occurred [The MHPTS consists of 16 individual items that describe a representative number of characteristic nontechnical crew resource management (CRM) behaviours for high-performance teamwork and can be rated using a 3-point scale (0 = never/almost never, 1 = alternating/inconsistent, 2 = constant/consistent). It thus provides a brief, validated, and practical rating scale that can be used by CRM-inexperienced team members in a high-performance medical setting to reflect on important CRM skills and evaluate their own team performance. The NASA-TLX assesses subjectively perceived stress while completing a task on a visual analogue scale (VAS) in six domains [