The patient has verified his or her identity, the surgical site, the type of procedure, and his or her consent. Check.

The surgical site is marked on a patient if such marking is appropriate for the procedure. Check.

The probe measuring blood oxygen content has been placed on the patient and is functioning. Check.

All members of the surgical and anesthesia team are aware of whether the patient has a known allergy? Check.

These were the first items on a nineteen-point World Health Organization (WHO) surgical safety checklist from an international research study to evaluate the impact of routinely using checklists in operating rooms. The research involved over 7,500 patients undergoing surgery in eight hospitals (Toronto, Canada; New Delhi, India; Amman, Jordan; Auckland, New Zealand; Manila, Philippines; Ifakara, Tanzania; London, England; and Seattle, WA) and was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2009.

Some of the items on the checklist were already part of standard care at many of the enrolled hospitals, such as the use of oxygen monitoring probes. Other items, such as ensuring that there was a contingency plan for major blood loss prior to each surgical procedure, were not part of routine surgical practice. The impact of checklist implementation was quite impressive, showing that this simple safety measure nearly halved the rate of death in surgical patients from 1.6% to 0.8%. The infection rate at the site of the surgical procedure also decreased from 6.2% in the months preceding the checklist introduction to a mere 3.4%.

Checklists as a Panacea?

The remarkable results of the 2009 study were met with widespread enthusiasm. This low-cost measure could be easily implemented in hospitals all over the world and could potentially lead to major improvements in patient outcomes. It also made intuitive sense that encouraging communication between surgical team members via checklists would reduce complications after surgery.

A few weeks after the study’s publication, the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) in the United Kingdom issued a patient safety alert, requiring National Health Service (NHS) organizations to use the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist for all patients undergoing surgical procedures. In 2010, Canada followed suit and also introduced regulations requiring the use of surgical safety checklists. However, the data for the efficacy of such lists had only been obtained in observational research studies conducted in selected hospitals. Would widespread mandatory implementation of such a system in “real world” community hospitals also lead to similar benefits?

A recently published study in the New England Journal of Medicine lead by Dr. David Urbach at the University of Toronto has now reviewed the surgery outcomes of hospitals in Ontario, Canada, comparing the rate of surgical complications during three-month periods before and after the implementation of the now mandatory checklists. Nearly all the hospitals reported that they were adhering to the checklist requirements and the vast majority used either a checklist developed by the Canadian Patient Safety Institute, which is even more comprehensive than the WHO checklist or other similar checklists. After analyzing the results of more than 200,000 procedures at 101 hospitals, Urbach and colleagues found no significant change in the rate of death after surgery after the introduction of the checklists (0.71% versus 0.65% – not statistically significant). Even the overall complication rates or the infection rates in the Ontario hospitals did not change significantly after surgical teams were required to complete the checklists.

Check the Checklist

The discrepancy in the results between the two studies is striking. How can one study demonstrate such a profound benefit of introducing checklists while a second study shows no significant impact at all? The differences between the two studies may hold some important clues. The 2009 study had a pre-checklist death rate of 1.6%, which is more than double the pre-checklist death rate in the more recent Ontario study. This may reflect the nature and complexity of the surgeries surveyed in the first study and also the socioeconomic differences. A substantial proportion of the patients in the international study were enrolled in low-income or middle-income countries. The introduction of a checklist may have been of much greater benefit to patients and hospitals that were already struggling with higher complication rates.

Furthermore, as the accompanying editorial by Dr. Lucian Leape in the New England Journal of Medicine points out, assessment of checklist implementation in the recent study by Urbach and colleagues was based on a retrospective analysis of self-reports by surgical teams and hospitals. Items may have been marked as “checked” in an effort to rush through the list and start the surgical procedures without the necessary diligence and time required to carefully go through every single item on the checklist. In the 2009 WHO study, on the other hand, surgical teams were aware of the fact that they were actively participating in a research study and the participating surgeons may have therefore been more motivated to meticulously implement all the steps on a checklist.

One of the key benefits of checklists is that they introduce a systematic and standardized approach to patient care and improve communication between team members. It is possible that the awareness of surgical teams in the Ontario hospitals in regards to patient safety and the need for systematic communication was already raised to higher level even before the introduction of the mandatory checklists so that this mandate may have had less of an impact.

Looking Forward

The study by Urbach and colleagues does not prove that safety checklists are without benefit. It highlights that there is little scientific data supporting the use of mandatory checklists. Since the study could not obtain any data on how well the checklists were implemented in each hospital, it is possible that checklists are more effective when team members buy into their value and do not just view it as another piece of mandatory and bureaucratic paperwork.

Instead of mandating checklists, authorities should consider the benefits of allowing surgical teams to develop their own measures that improve patient safety and team communication. The safety measures will likely contain some form of physical or verbal checklists. By encouraging surgical teams to get involved in the development process and tailor the checklists according to the needs of individual patients, surgical teams and hospitals, they may be far more motivated to truly implement them.

Optimizing such tailored checklists, understanding why some studies indicate benefits of checklists whereas others do not and re-evaluating the efficacy of checklists in the non-academic setting will all require a substantial amount of future research before one can draw definitive conclusions about the efficacy of checklists. Regulatory agencies in Canada and the United Kingdom should reconsider their current mandates. Perhaps an even more important lesson to be learned is that health regulatory agencies should not rush to enforce new mandates based on limited scientific data.

Urbach DR, Govindarajan A, Saskin R, Wilton AS, & Baxter NN (2014). Introduction of surgical safety checklists in Ontario, Canada. The New England Journal of Medicine, 370 (11), 1029-38 PMID: 24620866