Study: Checklist helps reduce postop mortality

Editor's Note

A study of 14 South Carolina hospitals found the use of a 19-item surgical checklist developed by the World Health Organization resulted in a 22% decrease in postoperative mortality over 3 years, compared with hospitals not participating in the checklist program.

In the 14 participating hospitals, mortality was 3.38% in 2010 before implementation and 2.84% after implementation in 2013. The remaining 44 hospitals in the state had mortality rates of 3.5% in 2010 and 3.71% in 2013.

South Carolina has demonstrated that surgery checklists can save lives at large scale and how hospitals can support their teams to do it, the authors say.

Objective: To determine whether completion of a voluntary, checklist-based surgical quality improvement program is associated with reduced 30-day postoperative mortality. Background: Despite evidence of efficacy of team-based surgical safety checklists in improving perioperative outcomes in research trials, effective methods of population-based implementation have been lacking.