Introduction of the Surgical Safety Checklist

In January of 2007, the World Health Organization's (WHO) World Alliance for Patient Safety initiated a project called "Safe Surgery Saves Lives" to identify minimum standards of surgical care that can be universally applied across countries and settings. Through a two year process involving international input from surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, infectious disease specialists, epidemiologists and others, the WHO created a surgical safety checklist that encompasses a simple set of surgical safety standards that can be used in any surgical setting. Each safety step on the checklist is simple, widely applicable, and measurable. The Surgical Safety Checklist was piloted in 8 hospitals around the world and results demonstrated a significant decrease in death rate and postoperative complications.

This study proposes to introduce an adaptation of the Surgical Safety Checklist for an ambulatory care surgical program and to assess the efficacy of its adaptation and implementation on staff safety attitudes and patient outcomes. Specific ambulatory-based items will be included in the checklist and patient outcomes will be assessed using the Institute for Health Improvement's Perioperative Surgical Outcomes Tool which will also be adapted for use for the ambulatory setting as well as routine follow up phone calls with patients on the 1st postoperative day.