Ramona Bates, MD, pointed her blog at the December 2010 issue of the Arkansas BCBS Provider’s News, which includes the Blue Cross’s Blue Surgical Safety Checklist Implementation. If your hospital or surgery center is looking to implement the use of a surgical safety checklist, then this will be quite helpful.
She also reproduced the background of surgical safety checklist:
In January of 2007, WHO began a program aimed at improving the safety of surgical care globally. The initiative, Safe Surgery Saves Lives, aims to identify minimum standards of surgical care that can be universally applied across countries and settings.
Through a two-year process involving international input from surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, infectious disease specialists, epidemiologists, biomedical engineers, and quality improvement experts, as well as patients and patient safety groups, WHO created a surgical safety checklist that encompasses a simple set of safety standards that can be used in any surgical setting.
The checklist was officially launched on June 25, 2008.
