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New research highlights benefits of surgical safety checklists
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Recently published data and clinical differences observed on a local level have begun to verify the effectiveness of simple surgical checklists for increasing safety.
Such practices have been proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO), which launched a patient safety program in 2004, as noted in a WHO patient safety alert.
According to the alert, the results of a WHO 2007-2008 pilot study showed that at least half a million deaths per year would be prevented with worldwide use of the organization’s surgical safety checklist.
In a study conducted in the Netherlands, investigators there also showed that using a checklist between October 2007 and March 2009 reduced surgical complications by more than one-third and deaths by almost 50% in test hospitals vs. control hospitals. The Dutch study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine.
These checklists are gradually making a clinical difference, according to the alert. Research conducted at Stanford University and presented at the 2010 American College of Surgeons Annual Congress that found that the observed/expected mortality ratio declined from 0.88 in the first quarter to 0.80 in the second quarter when a modified version of the WHO’s surgical safety checklist was used.
According to the alert, the Stanford researchers also found that checklist use increased the frequency with which staff reported patient safety never events, while the number of those events that were related to errors or complications decreased from 35.2% to 24.3%.
In the alert, Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, external lead of the Second Global Patient Safety Challenge on Safe Surgery in the WHO Patient Safety Programme, called results of the new studies a “remarkable validation. It is clear that the WHO surgical safety checklist has already saved many thousands of lives since its introduction. We need to keep the pressure on health care facilities around the world to ensure adoption of the checklist so that hundreds of thousands more lives can be saved.”
The WHO introduced its checklist globally in June 2008 with more than 3,900 hospitals in more than 122 countries registering as Safe Surgery Saves Lives Participating Hospitals, signifying their intent to introduce the WHO’s surgical safety checklist in their operating rooms.
References:
De Vries EN, Prins HA, Crolla RM, et al. Effect of a comprehensive surgical safety system on patient outcomes.N Engl J Med. 2010;363:1928-1937.
www.who.int/en
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