[WHO Surgical Safety Checklist and guideline for safe surgery 2009]

The World Health Organization (WHO) launched the Safe Surgery Saves Lives campaign in 2007 to improve safety of surgical care in the world. As a part of the campaign, the first edition of the Surgical Safety Checklist was created through an international consultative process in 2008 and the second edition was published in the WHO Guidelines for Safe Surgery 2009. The guidelines consist of ten essential objectives for safe surgery, and nine of the ten objectives are facilitated by introducing the surgical checklist in the operating room, which is designed to improve teamwork of the operating room member and to give them chances to use the safety processes consistently. It consists of nineteen check points scheduled to be used in three phases: before anesthesia induction, before any skin incision, and at the end of surgery. In this article we gave an outline of WHO Surgical Safety Checklist and WHO Guidelines for Safe Surgery 2009, and reviewed the evidence of the guidelines and checklist. Finally we presented the evidence indicating the efficacy of the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist, which included the pilot study attached in the guidelines showing that its use markedly decreased complications in patients undergoing noncardiac surgery in eight diverse international hospitals.