...It's taken how many years of operations, in the history of medicine, for someone to figure out that they should use a checklist?? How many PhDs in Medicine does it take to screw in a lightbulb?? Holy crap! We use checklists just to make sure we close our store up properly each night. Knowing this, I can't believe I've ever agreed to have an operation. It's like we've been living in the Dark Ages!
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http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2009/01/14/surgery-check-list.html
A simple checklist, similar to the one pilots use before take off, helped to halve the rate of surgery-related deaths, an international team of doctors reported Wednesday.
The checklist included:
- Giving antibiotics on time.
- Making sure the correct patient is on the operating table, and the correct surgical site is identified.
- Checking anesthesia, blood supply and allergies.
- Counting needles and sponges to make sure nothing was left inside.
In this week's New England Journal of Medicine, researchers reported on how well the checklist worked on more than 7,500 surgical patients in eight hospitals in these cities: Toronto, Seattle, London, New Delhi, Amman, Auckland, Manila and Ifakara in Tanzania.
The rate of death was 1.5 per cent before the checklist was introduced, and dropped to 0.8 per cent afterward, Dr. Atul Gawande of Harvard Medical School in Boston and his co-authors reported.
In-patient complications also dropped from 11 per cent to seven per cent.
The most significant drops were in complications such as infections, heart attacks and blood clots, said Dr. Bryce Taylor of Toronto's University Health Network, who led the study in Canada.
"If you look at two million operations, it adds up to 60,000 patients per year who would be spared having a complication after surgery," said Taylor. "That's a pretty provocative number."
The checklist is now used at three hospitals in Toronto.
Phil Hassen, head of the Canadian Patient and Safety Institute, said he hopes the checklist will become standard operating practice at every hospital in Canada within six months, given the dramatic improvements researchers have seen.
2 comments:
Making sure the correct patient is on the operating table.
Um. YOU THINK????
There's no sense rushing into these new-fangled ideas. Why next thing you know, someone will require that Doctors observe scheduled sleep/duty cycles like airline pilots and truck drivers must... How would hospitals function like that?
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