Operating Room WHO Surgical Safety Checklist Process Completion: an Observational Study

The WHO Surgical Safety Checklist is a simple tool designed to improve the safety of surgical procedures by bringing together the whole operating team (surgeons, anaesthesia providers and nurses) to perform key safety checks during vital phases of perioperative care: prior to the induction of anesthesia, prior to skin incision and before the team leaves the operating room. In 2007, WHO Patient Safety launched the Second Global Patient Safety Challenge, Safe Surgery Saves Lives.Anaesthetists, operating theatre nurses, surgeons, safety experts, patients and other professionals came together and came up with the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist. The 19 items of the surgical checklist have shown to improve on mortality and morbidity. Surgical time out is carried out before the start of any surgical procedures to reduce the occurrence of wrong-site, wrong-procedure, and wrong-person surgery where the patient's identity, the procedure, and the surgical site before surgical incision or the start of the procedure is verified. This also helps to raise any concern regarding the procedural risk and any concerns, prevent medical errors, patient morbidity, patient mortality, and reduce surgical complication rates. The Checklist is intended as a tool for use by clinicians interested in improving the safety of their operations and reducing unnecessary surgical deaths and complications and also help ensure that teams consistently follow a few critical safety steps and thereby minimize the most common and avoidable risks endangering the lives and wellbeing of surgical patients . The aim of this Checklist is to reinforce accepted safety practices and foster better communication and teamwork between clinical disciplines.