Episode Summary
Welcome back to the Safety of Work podcast. Today we discuss whether pre-surgery checklists improve the safety of procedures.
Episode Notes
We use the papers to frame our discussion: A Systematic Review of the Effectiveness, Compliance, and Critical Factors for Implementation of Safety Checklists in Surgery; Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effect of the World Health Organization Surgical Safety Checklist on Post-Operative Complications; and The Effects of Safety Checklists in Medicine.
Tune in to hear our thoughts on this potentially life or death issue.
Topics:
- The good reputation of checklists.
- Equipment Failure.
- The decrease of information loss.
- Do checklists slow things down?
- How closely checklists are followed.
- The rhyme of reason for checklists.
Quotes:
“Checklists are one of those things that have been associated with safety for a long time and associated in a way that gives them quite a good name.”
“Lots of stuff being recorded as positively improving with the introduction of a checklist.”
“If you can’t convince a multidisciplinary team that this belongs on the checklist, because they all agree there is a clear link between this item and a particular accident that they all know about, then you don’t get to put it on the checklist.”
Resources: