Evaluation of a patient safety programme on Surgical Safety Checklist Compliance: a prospective longitudinal study

Surgical Safety Checklists (SSC) have been implemented widely across 132 countries since 2008. Yet, despite associated reductions in postoperative complications and death rates, implementation of checklists in surgery remains a challenge. The aim of this study was to assess the impact of a patient safety programme over time on SSC use and incidence of clinical errors.

A prospective longitudinal design over three time points and a retrospective secondary analysis of clinical incident data was undertaken.

We implemented a patient safety programme over 4 weeks to improve surgical teams' use of the SSC. We undertook structured observations to assess surgical teams' checklist use before and after programme implementation and conducted a retrospective audit of clinical incident data 12 months before and 12 months following implementation of the programme.

There were significant improvements in the observed use of the SSC across all phases, particularly in sign-out where completion rates ranged from 79.3% to 94.5% (p<0.0001) following programme implementation. Across clinical incident audit periods, 33 019 surgical procedures were performed. Based on a subsample of 64 cases, clinical incidents occurred in 22/16 264 (0.13%) before implementation and 42/16 755 (0.25%) cases after implementation. The most predominant incident after programme implementation was inadequate tissue specimen labelling (23/42, 54.8%). Clinical incidents resulted in minimal or no harm to the patient.

The benefit in using a surgical checklist lies in the potential to enhance team communications and the promotion of a team culture in which safety is the priority.