An initiative to implement surgical safety checklists at 13 South Carolina hospitals was linked with improved staff perceptions of mutual respect, clinical leadership, assertiveness on behalf of safety, team coordination and communication, safe practice, and perceived checklist outcomes, according to a just-published study.
The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of a large-scale implementation of surgical safety checklists on staff perceptions of perioperative safety in the operating room, according to the study results in press for the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.
As part of the Safe Surgery 2015 initiative to implement the checklists in South Carolina hospitals, the members of the research team administered a validated survey designed to measure perception of multiple areas of perioperative safety among membes of the clinical operating room staff before and after implementation of a surgical safety checklist.
Thirteen hospitals administered baseline and follow-up surveys, separated by one to two years. Results suggest improvement in five of the five dimensions of teamwork. The relative percent improvement ranged from +2.9% for coordination to +11.9% for communication. These statistics were significant after adjusting for respondent characteristics, hospital fixed-effects, and multiple comparisons, and clustering robust standard errors by hospital, the researchers said.
More than half of respondents (54.1%) said their surgical teams always used checklists effectively; 73.6% said checklists had averted problems or complications. (To access the abstract, go to bit.ly/1m1Qlrq. To access an award-winning safety checklist, see “Defective instrument probe and safety checklist lead to award,” Same-Day Surgery, July 2015, at bit.ly/1WSiFtG.)
