Operating room teams were 74 percent less likely to miss a critical process of care during a surgical crisis when they used checklists than when they did not, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The study was led by Atul Gawande, MD, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and author of The Checklist Manifesto, and was funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Seventeen operating room teams at one academic medical center and two community hospitals participated in 106 simulated surgical-crisis scenarios, such as a cardiac arrest and massive hemorrhage. Each team managed half the scenarios with a set of crisis checklists and the remaining half with only memory of critical processes of care.
When the teams used the checklists, only 6 percent of steps were missed, while 23 percent of steps were missed when they did not use checklists. In addition, 97 percent of participants said they would want the checklist used if they were undergoing an operation and a crisis occurred.
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The study was led by Atul Gawande, MD, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and author of The Checklist Manifesto, and was funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Seventeen operating room teams at one academic medical center and two community hospitals participated in 106 simulated surgical-crisis scenarios, such as a cardiac arrest and massive hemorrhage. Each team managed half the scenarios with a set of crisis checklists and the remaining half with only memory of critical processes of care.
When the teams used the checklists, only 6 percent of steps were missed, while 23 percent of steps were missed when they did not use checklists. In addition, 97 percent of participants said they would want the checklist used if they were undergoing an operation and a crisis occurred.
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