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SAFETY
Stephen Harden
7 Commonsense Checklist Enhancers
Follow these tips to eliminate surgical mistakes.
CHECKING IT TWICE Checklists help your surgical team verify that critical safety steps haven't been missed.
Whether you're thinking of implementing a surgical safety checklist for the first time or looking to enhance the one you've been using for years, these 7 tips will improve the usefulness of this simple but highly effective patient protection tool.
1. Make it user-built and maintained
The people who actually do the work are best suited and most responsible for creating the standard for how the work is accomplished. Checklists created by other people at other facilities will rarely work well. There is no emotional investment and no pride of authorship in an "off-the-shelf" checklist.
2. Keep it short
Not everything has to be on a checklist. Checklists are used to verify only the critical items of a procedure. Critical items are those that if not done correctly will cause harm to patients or caregivers before that error can be stopped.
3. Don't confuse it with an audit tool
Checklists aren't about creating a paper trail; they're intended to help the team (not the individual) cross-check and verify, with 2 or
