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Access to theatres and associated clinical areas should be appropriately restricted.¹¹⁷

All staff involved in the prescribing, dispensing, preparing, administering and monitoring of medicines must be appropriately trained.^160,161

All theatre staff involved in any aspects of the use of medicines should have access to up to date resources on safe preparation and administration of medicines, and access to a pharmacy service for advice. ^127,140

There must be a system for ordering, storage, recording and auditing of controlled medicines in all areas where they are used, in accordance with legislation.^{161,162,163,164}

All drugs required for safe delivery of anaesthesia including emergency drugs, should be available. Some drugs such as dantrolene or intralipid may be held centrally rather than immediately to hand.

Robust systems should be in place to ensure reliable medicines management, including accurate medication history taking and documentation on admission, medication storage facilities, stock review and management, supply, expiry checks, and access to appropriately trained pharmacy staff to manage any medicine shortages.¹⁶⁰

All local anaesthetic solutions should be stored in a separate storage unit from intravenous infusion solutions, to reduce the risk of accidental intravenous administration of such medication.^160,165

All medication containing infusions and syringes should be clearly labelled and ideally colour coded in accordance with the anaesthesia recommended scheme.¹⁶⁶

Following admission and prior to undergoing a procedure that requires general or regional anaesthesia, all patients should have a preoperative visit by an anaesthetist, ideally a person directly involved with the administration of the anaesthetic.⁴² This should be done to confirm earlier findings or, in the case of emergency admission, initiate preoperative anaesthetic assessment and care.

Information from the patient’s preoperative assessment should be readily available, ideally as part of an electronic patient record, so that information is easy to transfer between locations and to enable data collection for later analysis.^5,80