Implementation of Surgical Safety Checklist Reduces Morbidity in a Tertiary Care Hospital

Abstract

Background: Surgery is an essential part of health care. Adverse events can occur in surgical care but more than half of these are avoidable. A number of checklists have been developed to reduce these adverse events; the WHO surgical safety checklist has shown better outcome improvements than previous checklists. This study was designed to apply WHO surgical safety checklist in operation theaters of a tertiary care hospital to measure baseline surgical safety protocols and outcome measurements. Methodology: This was a prospective interventional study conducted in three phases. First phase was base line data collection, implementation of surgical safety checklist during second phase and post-implementation data collection in last phase. A total of 613 patients were included, consisting of 303 during pre-implementation and 310 in post-implementation. Duration of each phase was 3 months. Primary end points were discharge from hospital, 25 days or death.