In 1978, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), developed a generic anesthesia equipment preuse checklist. The checklist was first released by the FDA in August 1986 and endorsed by the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists on October 18, 1986. The FDA checklist was revised in 1992 to improve the abilities of anesthesia providers to detect machine faults. In the present study, the investigators attempted to determine the effectiveness of the revised FDA checklist in detection of anesthesia machine faults as compared to providers' usual methods. Whereas no published study of preanesthesia safety inspection had been performed since the revision of the FDA checklist, the authors compared the detection abilities of anesthesia providers before and after inclusion of the revised FDA checklist. Twenty-two anesthesia providers were tested to compare the number of prearranged anesthesia machine faults that could be detected with (1) their usual checkout methods, and (2) with the revised FDA checklist. Data describing the subjects' fault detection abilities were analyzed using the t test for paired observation (P value