Compliance of WHO Surgical Safety Checklist at a Pediatric Surgical Unit in a Tertiary Level Hospital: A Descriptive Cross-sectional Study

Abstract

Introduction: The Surgical safety checklist by World Health Organization has been used for the last two decades. There is every chance of unwanted expected disasters in Operating-Room in Pediatricsurgical cases. Our study is to observe the utilization of the safety checklist and evaluate occurrence of never-events in Tertiary Level Pediatric Surgery Unit in Nepal. Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was done at Nepal Medical College Teaching Hospital from January 2021-June 2021 with record-based data of children from 0-15 years operated in Pediatric Surgery unit from March 2017-July 2018. Ethical approval (Reference number: 049-077-078) was taken from the Institution review committee of the institute. Convenience sampling was done. Self-designed Pro-forma with demographic data along with World Health Organization-Surgical-safety-checklist used was collected and entered in Microsoft-Excel. Data were analyzed using Statistical-Package-for-the-Social-Sciences-version-25. Results: Out of 267 cases enrolled, 103 (38.6%) (35.6-41.6 at 95% Confidence Interval) were fully compliant with the checklist, 69 (25.8%) partially compliant. Among compliant cases, 148 (55.4%) Sign-in part, 128 (47.9%) cases -Time-out part and 152 (56.9%) cases Sign-out part were complete. Conclusions: Compliance with World Health Organization-Surgical-safety-checklist has a major role in preventing morbidity and mortality in Pediatric surgical cases. With proper use of the checklist, the unwanted never-events can be prevented with better surgical outcomes.

A retrospective analysis of the factors associated with surgical checklist compliance using data from a local health unit in Italy, 2018–2021

“…The benefits of following the SSC during surgical procedures seem to be dampened by partial compliance, with limited evidence that the risk of complications is positively associated with checklist incompleteness and unidentified non‐conformities (NCs) 9,20 . However, studies that examine factors associated with the risk of NCs, when identified, are lacking.…”

“…[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] The benefits of following the SSC during surgical procedures seem to be dampened by partial compliance, with limited evidence that the risk of complications is positively associated with checklist incompleteness and unidentified non-conformities (NCs). 9,20 However, studies that examine factors associated with the risk of NCs, when identified, are lacking. The objective of this study was to conduct such an investigation using data from a local health unit (LHU) in Italy that spans the 4-year period 2018-2021.…”