Yes, I am procrastinating on writing a post on S-CHIP but the "black belt" in me just couldn't help writing this first.You don't to be a Six Sigma practitioner to know for any system to be improved, it has to be stabilized first...so I was delighted to see a new study where the simple checklist strikes again. If there is one place I want a checklist to be used for myself, it is while I am undergoing surgery.
In a study published online by the New England Journal of Medicine this week, a simple 19-item list was found to reduce deaths and complications by more than a third. The simple elegance of the list is that it requires members of the surgery team to coordinate and confirm their individual understandings and actions and it even includes a surgical team "time out" before incision.
On NBC news last night (see video), one of the lead authors stated that he thought the checklist would lead to maybe 10-15 percent improvement but that he was very surprised to see 38 percent improvement in reduced deaths and complications. It is also important to note that 93% of the surgeons in the study would want the checklist to be used if they were ever in surgery. Again, it seems that our health care system has focused so much on high-tech wizardry, that we have forgotten that the simple things often make the biggest difference. ~BAA
0 comments:
Post a Comment