Last week, I attended the launch of the World Health Organization (WHO) “Safe Surgery Saves Lives” campaign. It’s an impressive international project that has tremendous potential for reducing surgical errors by the simple inclusion of a checklist into the process of surgical care.

As the initiative’s lead, Harvard surgeon and noted mainstream author Atul Gawande said, the idea is to borrow from the processes adopted by the much safer airline industry. Checklists went a long way in reducing flight errors so long ago that they are now fully ingrained in the process.

The Surgical Safety Checklist is brilliant in its simplicity and in the way it directly addresses many problems that arise with surgery, but I also think there’s a big missed opportunity on WHO’s “first edition” of the checklist. The third column–the “Sign Out” process–doesn’t specify any patient engagement. The closest it comes is, “Surgeon, anaesthesia professional and nurse review the key concerns for recovery and management of this patient.”

My understanding from people involved in the process was that the first stage of the campaign specifically decided to focus on the “intra-operative” aspects of safe surgery to the exclusion of patient participation and education. No doubt there are plenty of errors that can be solved by getting the surgical team all on the same page, but failure to engage patients is a major lost opportunity.

As WHO prepares for its “second edition,” I hope that at the very least, they add an additional box to check on the “Sign Out” column of the checklist that would read, “Patient’family provided an information prescription regarding instructions for post-operative management and what signs should trigger contact with providers or other actions.”

With Consumers Advancing Patient Safety President Susan Sheridan advising WHO, I know that they are getting excellent and passionate guidance about consumers’ information needs. I just hope that they listen to it as they go forward to maximize the potential impact of the Safe Surgery Saves Lives campaign.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 11:08 am and is filed under Engaging Consumers, Patient Safety. Tags: World Health Organization You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.