Unsafe medication practices and medication errors are a leading cause of injury and avoidable patient harm in health care systems around the world. Medication harm accounts for 50% of overall preventable harm recognised by WHO. The elimination of multiple steps during preparation of an intravenous medication, [e.g. drawing it up into a syringe, and labelling the syringe], is one of the few hard-engineering opportunities to improve the safety of medication administration during anaesthesia. The well-established and widespread use of prefilled syringes in other areas of medicine (e.g. subcutaneous heparin and vaccines) has delivered remarkable systemic improvements in patient safety; this could be achieved in anaesthesia, intensive care and pain medicine.