What the ASA Field Is Actually Doing
Every record in this logbook carries an ASA physical status field — options 1 through 6, plus E for emergency modifier. Residents who use this consciously and accurately end up with a casemix profile at the end of their rotation. Residents who enter it carelessly end up with a log that shows they managed 200 cases but can't tell an assessor what percentage were ASA 3 or above, or how many emergency modifier cases they handled under remote supervision.
For anaesthetic training programs with minimum case requirements by ASA category or urgency, that profile is the difference between meeting the criteria and having to argue your way through remediation. Most accreditation bodies want to see that you've had meaningful exposure to high-acuity patients — the logbook either proves it or it doesn't.
The Record That Captures a Full Clinical Day
The QAnaes Logbook template structures each case as a single entry with interlocking clinical variables.
Speciality runs to 19 options — general surgery, ortho/trauma, obstetrics, gynaecology, urology, bariatric, cardiac, thoracic, neurosurgery, ENT, eye, plastics, oral maxillofacial, oncology, paediatric surgery, paediatric dental, dental, radiology, vascular. This is the case distribution summary you need at year-end review. A trainee who has logged 40 cases in general surgery but zero in cardiac or thoracic, who is in a rotation that should be delivering subspecialty exposure, has a documented gap that needs to be addressed before the rotation ends — not discovered at final assessment.
Type of Anaesthetic is a checkboxes field, which matters because combinations occur: you might do a GA ETT with a regional block simultaneously. The options cover the full mode taxonomy — GA mask, GA LMA, GA ETT, Spinal, Epidural, CSE, Regional, MAC, Other. Cross-referenced with the Procedures field (which captures the technical procedures performed: IV cannula, arterial line, CVC, spinal, epidural, CSE, regional block, TTE, TEE), you have both the anesthetic mode and the procedures that went with it.
Supervision is the most consequential field for training trajectory. Solo means you were the independent operator. Teaching means you were being supervised and instructed simultaneously. Remote supervision is its own category — physically unsupervised, with consultant available by phone. The distribution across these three states over a rotation tells you whether you're being developed or just used as service labor. If 80% of your cases are logging as Remote Supervision on a rotation that's supposed to be Supervised Teaching, that's information someone needs to act on.
The Handover Field and Why It Exists
Most logbooks ignore handover cases. This one has a dedicated field: Taken Over, Handed Over, Not Applicable.
This matters for case counting and for medicolegal hygiene. When you hand over a case mid-list — the 5-hour abdominal resection that started at 14:00 and you left at 18:00 because your shift ended — you log it as Handed Over. The incoming registrar logs it as Taken Over. Neither of you claims a complete case. Handover discipline keeps the numbers honest and prevents double-counting.
The Critical Incident field is a free-text box that sits at the bottom of each record, adjacent to the Flagged Case color indicator. The color is visual triage — red for a case you want to review formally with your supervisor, yellow for one you're still processing, green for a straightforward entry. The critical incident text is where the clinical event gets documented briefly: a difficult airway conversion from LMA to ETT under emergency pressure, an unexpected vasopressor requirement at induction, a failed spinal that required GA. These aren't incident reports — they're a resident's private clinical diary that also happens to support learning portfolio requirements.
Start time and end time give you case duration, which is how you know whether that "quick" urology case that appeared on the list at 15:30 actually ran until 18:45.