Reference no: EM133357203
Assignment:
"Surgery checklists save lives," reports The Washington Post (April 18, 2017). Hospitals in South Carolina that completed a statewide program to implement the WHO's Surgical Safety Checklist had a 22% reduction in post-surgical deaths. The study appeared in the August 2017 issue of Annals of Surgery. It is one of the first to show a large-scale impact of the checklist on the general population.
Surgical care requires careful coordination of various skilled healthcare providers in a complex infrastructure using specialized tools. "Safety checklists are not a piece of paper that somehow magically protect patients, but rather they are a tool to help change practice, to foster a specific type of behavior in communication, to change implicit communication to explicit to create a culture where speaking up is permitted and encouraged and to create an environment where information is shared between all members of the team," said the Harvard Medical School professor directing the study.
A total of 14 hospitals completed the program, representing 40% of the state's total inpatient surgery population. Researchers compared the 30-day post-surgery mortality results between the checklist hospitals with those of the state hospitals. The report includes significant inpatient surgical procedures from various specialties, such as neurological, cardiac, and orthopedic surgery.
The 19-item checklist encourages surgical teams to discuss the surgical plan, risks, and concerns. Most of the items are simple, such as "does the patient have a known allergy" or "is essential imaging displayed." Following surgery, patients are at risk of complications and death from various causes, such as infection and organ failure. The checklist ends with a conversation requirement among the surgeon, anesthetist, and nurse about the patient's recovery and management plan. As a whole, the checklist items create an operating room communication culture that improves overall surgical care and safety before, during, and after an operation.
Classroom discussion questions:
1. What other tools could be used in operating rooms to improve quality?
2. Why are checklists so valuable?
3. What other industries use them regularly?