WHO ‘Safe Surgery Saves Lives’ Checklist: NABH COP 14

While dealing with care of patients who are undergoing surgical procedures, NABH recommends hospitals to refer to WHO ‘Safe Surgery Saves Lives’ Initiative. In this post, I bring to you a complete detail around the initiative and the checklist. This is also an important example that Dr. Atul Gawande quotes in his book – ‘The Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right’ and is one of my favourite books.

All the references are from the WHO’s website.

You can read an overview of the checklist on this page: http://bit.ly/OgsVIH

You can have a look at this 19 pointer checklist on the 20^th page of the pdf available on this link: http://bit.ly/NStgEM

I am sure you will have a lot of questions on what this checklist is all about and how to use it and is it applicable in your hospital. Don’t worry, WHO provides answers here: http://bit.ly/MtqbcY

And if you want to get a feel of how to do this checklist, watch the video below:

I’ve shown this video to 2 different audiences and both agreed that this checklist is short and crisp and can take care of a lot of elementary goof-ups that happen in their OTs and enhance patient safety. If you noticed, it doesn’t take more than 2 minutes each time you do the checklist. I think that’s time worth spent in protecting our patients.

Update on 30/08/2013
Based on a viewer comment, I felt there have to be other illustrations and videos for Safe Surgery Checklist which helps in better understanding of its implementation.

Below is a video from a hospital in Australia where a patient is undergoing Hip Replacement procedure. This one has the Pre-Incision (Time-Out) and Post-Procedure (Sign-Out) shoot only, but in a better detail.

This is another video from St. John of God Hospital in Australia. This one has two-part, the first one about how to do the Safe Surgery Checklist, and the second one about how not to do the checklist.

New added objective elements in NABH 3rd Edition (Revised) with self-assessment toolkit

As I discussed in an earlier post, from July 1st, hospitals are required to comply to the revised NABH standards covered under 3rd edition. The quality professionals can download the new self-assessment toolkit or checklist from NABH website itself using the following link: http://bit.ly/MZngaC

The revised edition has come up with new requirements and you would like to have a quick glance on the new objective elements. So we have done a comparison of the 2nd and the 3rd edition and identified the new objective elements.

Readers are advised to follow the link below to download another version of the self-assessment toolkit where we have marked 'Yes' against the new objective elements. You can reach the download page by clicking here.

Upon clicking the link, you would reach the Google Docs page. On the menu bar on the top-left, you would find a tab 'File'. When you click the tab, a drop-down will appear with the 'Download' option at its end.