[Safer anesthesia and duty hour limits: are handovers of personnel allowed?]

Restrictions of duty hours in medicine are an ambivalent matter with respect to patient safety. Continuity of treatment carries the risk of medical errors from declining performance capability and must be balanced against the risk of communication failure and information loss due to personnel changes. Complete intraoperative changes of anesthetists are frequently carried out in the clinical routine but possibly have the potential to negatively influence the postoperative morbidity and mortality. The relevance of anesthesiological care for the perioperative outcome also seems to vary depending on the specialist discipline involved. While standardized handover protocols seem to be only of limited effectiveness for the improvement of transfer of information, they are nevertheless a reasonable approach for optimization of interprofessional communication and reduction of treatment errors.