WHO Patient Safety News Alert: Surgical Checklists Save Lives

11/12/2010

In the recent edition of the WHO Patient Safety newsletter, we talked about checklists as quality and safety tools and gave you an update on the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist. New evidence published this week in the NEJM and results from a study in the US support earlier WHO findings that a surgical safety checklist could prevent at least half a million deaths per year.

Dr Atul Gawande, External Lead of the Second Global Patient Safety Challenge on Safe Surgery in the WHO Patient Safety Programme, called the results of the new studies “remarkable validation. It is clear that the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist has already saved many thousands of lives since its introduction. We need to keep the pressure on health care facilities around the world to ensure adoption of the checklist so that hundreds of thousands more lives can be saved.”

To view the WHO Patient Safety statement on this, please visit our website at:

http://www.who.int/patientsafety/en/

The WHO Patient Safety Team