A Verbal Electronic Checklist for Timeouts Linked to the Electronic Health Record

Checklists for image-guided interventions: a systematic review

OBJECTIVES

Safety checklists have improved safety in patients undergoing surgery. Checklists have been designed specifically for use in image-guided interventions. This systematic review aimed to identify checklists designed for use in radiological interventions and to evaluate their efficacy for improving patient safety. Secondary aims were to evaluate attitudes toward checklists and barriers to their use.

METHODS

OVID, MEDLINE, CENTRAL and CINAHL were searched using terms for "interventional radiology" and "checklist". Studies were included if they described pre-procedural checklist use in vascular/body interventional radiology (IR), paediatric IR or interventional neuro-radiology (INR). Data on checklist design, implementation and outcomes were extracted.

RESULTS

Sixteen studies were included. Most studies (n = 14, 87.5%) focused on body IR. Two studies (12.5%) measured perioperative outcome after checklist implementation, but both had important limitations. Checklist use varied between 54 and 100% and completion of items on the checklists varied between 28 and 100%. Several barriers to checklist use were identified, including a lack of leadership and education and cultural challenges unique to radiology.

CONCLUSIONS

We found few reports of the use of checklists in image-guided interventions. Approaches to checklist implementation varied, and several barriers to their use were identified. Evaluation has been limited. There seems to be considerable potential to improve the effective use of checklists in radiological procedures.

ADVANCES IN KNOWLEDGE

There are few reports of the use of checklists in radiological interventions, those identified reported significant barriers to the effective use of checklists.

Reality check of using the surgical safety checklist: A qualitative study to observe application errors during snapshot audits

Background

The WHO Surgical Safety Checklist (SSC) was established to address important safety issues and to reduce the number of surgical deaths. So far, numerous reports have demonstrated sub-optimal implementation of the SSC in practice and limited improvements in patient outcomes. Therefore, the aim of this study was to audit the SSC-practice in a real-world setting in a university hospital setting.

Methods

From 2015 to 2016, independent observers performed snapshot audits in operating theatres and shadowed the three phases of the SSC. Using a 4-point Likert-scale to rate the compliance on each audit day, we generated a report highlighting possible improvements and provided feedback to the operating team members.

Results

Audits were performed on 36 operating days (2015: n = 19; 2016: n = 17), in which a total of 136 surgical interventions were observed. Overall, the percentage of “very good compliance” improved from 2015 to 2016: for the sign-in from 52.9% to 81.2% (p = 0.141), for the team-time-out from 33.3% to 58.8% (p = 0.181), and for the sign-out from 21.4% to 41.7% (p = 0.401). The qualitative review revealed inconsistencies when applying the SSC, of which the missing documentation of an actually performed item or the wrong timing for an item was most common.

Conclusion

Snapshot audits revealed that SSC compliance has improved over the observed period, while its application revealed inconsistencies during the three phases of the SSC. Snapshot audits proved to be a valuable tool in the qualitative analysis of SSC compliance and gave more insight than a mere completeness check of ticks in SSC documents.