Study: A Simple Surgery Checklist Saves Lives
By Maia Szalavitz
Sticks and stones may break your bones — but if you need surgery, the right words used in the operating room can be more powerful than many drugs. New research published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that when surgical teams heed a simple checklist — as pilots do before takeoff — patient mortality rates were cut nearly in half and complications fell by more than a third.
The study — which included 7,688 patients in eight hospitals around the world — saw death rates drop from 1.5% before the checklist was instituted to 0.8% afterwards. Serious complications fell from 11% to 7%. Study sites included Seattle, London, Toronto, New Delhi and Ifakara, Tanzania.
“We were not anticipating such a dramatic reduction,” said lead author Dr. Atul Gawande, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. “We had initially planned the size of the study to pick up a 15% reduction in complications.”
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