Wednesday, doctors reported that a simple checklist made out to confirm a patient’s name, the procedure they are scheduled to undergo, their allergies and also to count needles and sponges so as to make sure nothing has been left inside the patient, reduced the number of surgery-related deaths.

Moreover, the World Health Organization team stated that besides cutting the risk of accidental deaths in surgery by half, the checklist also decreased the rate of complications stemming from a surgery.

The team tested their idea about the simple checklists on surgeons operating on more than 7,500 patients in eight hospitals in Toronto, Seattle, London, New Delhi, Amman, Auckland, Manila and Ifakara in Tanzania.

Their study 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.

Dr. Atul Gawande of Harvard Medical School in Boston, who led the study, wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that after the checklist was introduced, the rate of complications had gone down to 7 percent from 11 percent in the hospitals that participated.

The checklist also included checks on anesthesia, blood supply, sterile equipment and drugs and double-checks of the site to be operated on.

The team of doctors had initially reported their idea about the method back in June in The Lancet medical journal.