Alastair Lack: physician-inventor with a focus on patient safety in anaesthesia

Recipe book

Alastair Lack had a pivotal role in this transformation. His legacy is reflected today in the Royal College of Anaesthetists’ 400 page Raising the Standard: Quality Improvement Compendium. Launched in 2000 and now in its fourth edition, it was originally unofficially known as the “audit recipe book.” The concept was cooked up in the late 1990s by Lack and a team of “self-confessed pedants” in the kitchen of his river front home in the picturesque village of Coombe Bissett in Wiltshire. They wanted to devise a manual of quality improvement and audit tools for anaesthetists for national use.

Some observers say that the book was the biggest achievement of a clinician-scientist renowned for his boundless energy, towering intellect, passionate drive, and for writing an extraordinary number of controversial letters to the Times—he was also forthright on Twitter.

Others acclaim the foundation of the Society for Computing and Technology in Anaesthesia (SCATA) as his foremost accomplishment—this was said to have brought “anaesthesia into the 20th century.” Lack was among the first to recognise the need to integrate computers into anaesthetic systems.

Globally, he is best known for inventing the Lack circuit, a means of reducing pollution from anaesthetic gases in the operating theatre.

Paramedic services

But within Wiltshire, where he was a consultant anaesthetist in Salisbury, he was known primarily as …