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Hospital adopts WHO surgical safety checklist

Columbia Memorial Hospital’s operating room staff have tested and adopted the World Health Organization’s Surgical Safety Checklist, according to Emergency Department Director Barbara Brady, RN.

The checklist is one of WHO’s Institute of Health Care Improvement projects to protect five million lives.

According to Brady, the goal of the Safe Surgery Saves Lives Challenge is to improve the safety of surgical care around the world by ensuring adherence to proven standards of care in all states. The WHO Surgical Safety Checklist has improved compliance with standards and decreased complications from surgery around the world, she says.

“Columbia Memorial Hospital is a registered and participating hospital,” says Brady.

The checklist identifies three phases of an operation, each corresponding to a specific period in the normal flow of work. In each phase, the checklist helps teams confirm that the critical safety steps are completed before it proceeds with the operation. The Checklist has been proven to dramatically decrease errors, complications and deaths.

According to online sources from the WHO, hospitals in eight cities around the globe in a pilot program successfully demonstrated that the use of this simple surgical checklist during major operations can lower the incidence of surgery-related deaths and complications by one third. The studies were undertaken in hospitals in each of the six WHO regions from all types of demographic and economic regions.

According to online sources, analysis shows that the rate of major complications following surgery fell from 11% in the baseline period to 7% after introduction of the checklist, a reduction of one third. Inpatient deaths following major operations fell by more than 40% (from 1.5% to 0.8%).

“These findings have implications beyond surgery, suggesting that checklists could increase the safety and reliability of care in numerous medical fields,” writes Dr. Atul Gawande, main author of the study and team leader for the development of the WHO surgical safety checklist.

“The checklists must be short, extremely simple, and carefully tested in the real world. But in specialties ranging from cardiac care to pediatric care, they could become as essential in daily medicine as the stethoscope,” says Gawande.

According to Brady, the checklist requires only a few minutes to complete at three critical points during operative care – before anaesthesia is administered, before skin incision, and before the patient leaves the operating room. It is intended to ensure the safe delivery of anaesthesia, appropriate prophylaxis against infection, effective teamwork by the operating room staff, and other essential practices in perioperative care.