SURGICAL CHECKLIST MAY SAVE LIVES
The World Health Organization (WHO) is finding it necessary to get into the business of trying to make medical surgery a safer happening. According to WHO, some 234 million surgeries are performed globally each year.
This breaks down to about 1 surgery for every 25 people. With studies showing that a significant percentage of surgical procedures result in preventable complications or death, WHO is launching a new safety checklist for surgical teams to use in a major attempt to make surgeries safer everywhere in the world.
The initiative sponsored by WHO is known as Safe Surgery Saves Lives and is done jointly with the Harvard School of Public Health. The surgical safety checklist provided by WHO as part of this program has identified and implemented a set of surgical safety standards that can be utilized in all counties of the world and in all healthcare settings.
This appears to be a much needed measure for the medical community. According to several studies utilized by WHO, major complications from surgery occur in industrial countries in between 3 and 16 percent of inpatient surgical procedures. Permanent disability and death rates are about 0.4 to 0.8 percent. The death rate soars in developing countries to between 5 and 10 percent during major operations. In addition, post operative complications are also a major occurrence and a source of serious concern all around the world. Studies suggest that about half of these types of complications can be prevented, according to WHO.
Three phases of an operation receive focus on the checklist. These are “sign in” before anesthesia is introduced, “time out” before an incision is made”, and “sign out” before the patient leaves the operating room. “Sign in” would include marking the correct part of the body for surgery and checking on allergy conditions of the patient. “Sign out” would included checking to see that all surgical instruments, sponges and needles are accounted for and not left inside the patient’s body.
A pilot program conducted on 1,000 patients at 8 different sites indicates a doubled likelihood that the patient will receive higher, proven standards of care. While the final results are not yet in, WHO says that the complication and death rate in these 1,000 patients shows substantial reductions from the current norm.
The amount of people in the United States alone who die annually due to medical error is slated at about 98,000. If a substantial number of these can be reduced by the WHO checklist, it behooves every hospital, surgical unit and medical provider to implement the procedures as quickly as possible.
Source: The World Health Organization. “New Checklist to Help Make Surgery Safer.” Press Release. June 2005 http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2008/pr20/en/index.html
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