[Patient safety -- mission for the future: Recommendations for the management of severe treatment complications and burdensome courses (preventing the "second victim")].

Avoiding complications is a major goal of all patient safety efforts. We are used to working with all kinds of algorithms for avoiding adverse events or for the diagnosis and treatment of possible unforeseen or inadvertent complications in our patients. As a matter of fact, severe complications certainly have an impact not only on the patient, but also on the medical team involved ("second victim"). Obviously there is no published standard in Germany on how to deal with this professional problem. Therefore, the German Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine (DGAI) has elaborated guidelines for the individual professional concerned, for the colleagues of doctors involved, as well as for the supervisors and hospital institutions. The aim of these recommendations is to encourage our professional society to set a focus on this problem and to offer a structured course of action for the case that a major complication occurs in spite of all our efforts to maintain our patient's safety. © Georg Thieme Verlag Stuttgart · New York.