Are Your Safety Checklists Effective Enough?

Without these teamwork qualities, your OR staff’s pre-surgical rundowns may be incomplete.

A TEAM WORKS Patient safety depends on communication and respect.

Your physicians are the undisputed captains of the surgical ship, but are they totally onboard with patient safety? According to a recent study, that may require them to share leadership with their OR staff.

An analysis of surgical safety checklist performance at 10 South Carolina hospitals during 207 procedures between April 2011 and January 2013 found that few of the OR teams observed completed all of the items on the pre-surgical checklist.

Researchers explained that “procedural checks,” including confirming patient identity and marking the surgical site, were completed more often than such “conversation prompts” as a surgeon’s review of potentially unexpected steps or the nursing team’s equipment concerns.

Writing in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons online, the researchers noted that while surgeon engagement was one key to the success of a safety checklist, the completion of these conversation prompts — and the patient safety they promote — relies on consistent teamwork between surgeons and their staff.

This teamwork, they write, is based on “shared clinical leadership, open communication, active coordination, and mutual respect.”

David Bernard for Outpatient Surgery Magazine published: August 3, 2016