CHECKLISTS IN NEUROSURGERY - AN UPDATED REVIEW

Introduction. Checklists represent questionnaires aimed to reduce and prevent medical errors, a reliable and cost-efficient way to increase patients' safety and quality of healthcare services. They were first implemented in Intensive Care Units (ICU) and later adopted by several surgical specialties. Neurosurgery, not being immune to medical errors because of the complex procedures and large interdisciplinary teams, is a specialty which may highly benefit from adoption of safety checklists. Materials and Methods. Data from the international literature has been gathered through online libraries - PubMed and Google Scholar. We focused on the most relevant and up to date studies, reviews and meta-analysis which point to a direct connection between the implementation of checklists and reduction of error, complication and mortality rates. Discussion. Checklists are widely adopted in the ICU department as well as other medical specialties. Surgical specialties lay behind the latter, neurosurgery being in its early days of checklist implementation. Until now, the available data shows promising results on reducing complications and mortality. Conclusion. These results should be tested in larger studies, on multiple centers, all over the world. Starting from the ones already using these procedures it can lead to a global shift in both perception and health care procedures.