Using improvement science methods to increase accuracy of surgical consents

The surgical consent serves as a key link in preventing breakdowns in communication that could lead to wrong-patient, wrong-site, or wrong-procedure events. We conducted a quality improvement initiative at a large, urban pediatric academic medical center to reliably increase the percentage of informed consents for surgical and medical procedures with accurate safety data information at the first point of perioperative contact. Improvement activities focused on awareness, education, standardization, real-time feedback and failure identification, and transparency. A total of 54,082 consent forms from 13 surgical divisions were reviewed between May 18, 2011, and November 30, 2012. Between May 2011 and June 2012, the percentage of consents without safety errors increased from a median of 95.4% to 99.7%. Since July 2012, the median has decreased slightly but has remained stable at 99.4%. Our results suggest that effective safety checks allow discovery and prevention of errors.