Safety checklists improve patient survival

WHEN doctors, nurses and other hospital operating room staff follow a written safety checklist to respond when a patient experiences cardiac arrest, severe allergic reaction, bleeding followed by an irregular heart beat or other crisis during surgery, they are nearly 75 percent less likely to miss a critical clinical step, according to a new study funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

While the use of checklists is rapidly becoming a standard of surgical care, the impact of using them during a surgical crisis has been largely untested, according to the study published in the January 17 News