Simple checklists before, during and after the surgery might reduce the number of surgery-related deaths, according to a study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

 

The checklist was designed by the World Health Organization and includes things to do before the anesthesia, things to do before the patient is incised, and finally things to do before the patient leaves the operating room.

 

This kind of checklist was tested on more than 7,500 patients in eight hospitals in Toronto, Seattle, London, New Delhi, Amman, Auckland, Manila and Ifakara in Tanzania.

 

The study, which was led by Dr. Atul A. Gawande an associate professor of health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health and a surgeon at Brigham and Woman's Hospital, Boston, showed that before the checklist had been introduced in the procedures’ routines, the surgery-related death rate rose to 1.5 percent, while afterwards, it dropped to almost 0.8 percent.

 

Currently, the death rate from surgery itself, non-related to human errors is approximately 0.4 to 0.8 percent in developed countries and as much as 17 percent of the patients suffer from complications.

 

“Using a surgery checklist designed for safety cut the complication and death rate by a more than a third. There should be no time wasted in introducing these checklists to help surgical teams do their best work to save lives,” Dr. Gawande said.

 

As a result of the study, five US states - Indiana, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina and Washington - have endorsed the surgical checklist and plan to require their hospitals to use it.