Why do anaesthetists need codes?

With the increasing availability of information technology in hospitals 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 accuracy and compactness. Unfortunately, all the coding systems are different, making comparisons between different centres difficult. We propose that there is a need to develop a standard national system for coding anaesthetic terms.