Inter‐Rater Reliability in Pre‐Anaesthetic Airway Assessment: A Protocol for a Systematic Review
TL;DR
A systematic review of the available literature on inter‐rater reliability, agreement or variability in composite airway assessment tools and individual airway assessment components in the context of pre‐anaesthetic or preoperative assessment hypothesises that inter‐rater reliability of these tools and components will predominantly range from moderate to excellent.
Abstract
Pre‐anaesthetic airway assessment relies on subjective clinical judgement, whether performed through direct physical examination, such as Mallampati classification or thyromental distance, or through composite scoring systems that combine several such components, including the Simplified Airway Risk Index, the El‐Ganzouri Risk Index and the Wilson score. The clinical value of these assessments depends not only on their predictive accuracy but also on whether they can be applied consistently across assessors. However, evidence on the inter‐rater reliability, agreement or variability of these composite tools and their individual components remains scattered across the literature and has not previously been systematically synthesised. This systematic review therefore aims to identify, assess and synthesise the available literature on inter‐rater reliability, agreement or variability in composite airway assessment tools and individual airway assessment components in the context of pre‐anaesthetic or preoperative assessment. Based on previous inter‐observer studies of individual airway assessment components, we hypothesise that inter‐rater reliability of these tools and components will predominantly range from moderate to excellent.