Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
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Simple Surgery Checklist Reduces Deaths and Complications

surgery door
Image by Paul Stevenson via Flickr

Does your surgeon have a “pre-flight” checklist?

An interesting article from Reuters UK today, revealed:

A simple checklist to confirm a patient’s name, what procedure is to be done, check allergies and count needles and sponges to make sure nothing got left inside halved the rate of surgery-related deaths, doctors reported on Wednesday.

In this study, the rate of complications fell from 11 percent to 7 percent.

Apparently, there was a great deal of reluctance among surgical teams to comply with the checklist experiment. But the results were so positive that many teams have come on-board with the practice.

If you have a choice of surgeons, this could be a good question to ask during your pre-op appointment.

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Category: Surgery and Alternatives
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