Application of the WHO surgical safety checklist outside the operating theatre: medicine can learn from surgery

Safety checklists in medicine are designed to identify a potential error before it results in harm to a patient. The World Health Organization (WHO) safety checklist was widely implemented in surgical practice in the UK after significant reductions in death, and pen-operative complications were achieved in eight countries worldwide in the 'Safe Surgery Saves Lives' campaign of 2008. Nevertheless, use of the checklist for invasive medical procedures is not yet routine. Such procedures are becoming ever more complex, necessitating multidisciplinary team management and involving higher-risk patients, with the need for general anaesthesia on occasion. As a result, the potential for error increases and the need for a safety checklist has become more apparent. Such a checklist. can be modified to provide a framework for specialty-specific safety checks, enhanced team-working and communication for invasive medical procedures. Following an audit of use of the WHO checklist in 20 cases under general anaesthesia in our quaternary referral cardiac catheterisation laboratory, we discovered use of this safety tool was poor (performed/documented: sign in 30%/40%, time out 10%/15%, sign out 10%/15%) and we identified two 'near miss' incidents within the audit period. We then developed and implemented a modified WHO checklist for the specific challenges faced in the cardiac catheterisation laboratory. Following a staff education programme, a subsequent audit of 34 cases demonstrated improvement in all sections (performed/documented: sign in 91.2%182.4%, time out 85.3%176.5%, sign out 73.5%/64.7%) with no patient safety incidents during the post-intervention audit period. Well-designed, procedural checklists may well prove to be of benefit in other areas of interventional medicine.