WHO Surgical Checklists

 

Health Care Safety Tool and Checklist Development

Reduce Medical Errors in Your Hospital with Effective Tools and Health Care Checklists

Although the media interest in healthcare checklists is at a fever pitch, LifeWings has been helping hospitals nationwide develop and effectively implement life-saving surgical and healthcare checklists since 2001. We based our methodology for these critical tools on the same foundation behind aviation safety tools and our clients have achieved remarkable results. The reliability of implementing checklists in high-risk situations is well documented.

 

Health Care and Surgical Checklists Can Improve Your Hospital's Quality anMedical Checklist Studyd Financial Performance

Standout medical institutions and LifeWings clients like Vanderbilt, Rush, and UCLAhave been successfully implementing safety tools like checklists for their physicians and nurses for years. Hospital executives say using surgical checklists have more benefits than just safety. Dr. Stanley W. Marks, Senior Vice President & Chief Medical Officer for six hospitals in the Memorial Healthcare System in Hollywood, FL says, “Not only have we made our hospitals much safer than they already were with our surgery checklists, our patients are more satisfied with their care and our physicians love working here because of our commitment to their patient’s safety.”

 

Other than safety, the most important benefit cited by healthcare leaders is the lower costs that come with better safety. By using healthcare checklists, administrators have discovered that staff make fewer costly mistakes, are less wasteful with medical supplies, and more efficient with their time. Says Dr. Marks, whose hospitals have used aviation-based checklists for three years, “Once we saw how our system began to run even more reliably and with fewer delays, we realized checklists were the right thing for our patients and the right thing to do for our bottom line.”


LifeWings Works With Your Teams To Select, Develop, and Implement the Best Tools and Checklists for Improvement at Your Hospital

Implementing standardized healthcare checklists may provide some improvement but we have found that each facility has unique challenges and processes. By performing thorough risk assessments and collaborating with your teams, we can help you uncover where the greatest needs for checklists exist and gain buy-in from all levels to develop a realistic tool. Our program ensures that your hospital hardwires these checklists and tools into your system for optimal and sustainable results. By adapting crew resource management (CRM) techniques used successfully for years by organizations with outstanding safety records, LifeWings trains healthcare personnel how to communicate and utilize these tools consistently.

 

Because we measure the effectiveness of our engagements, we have demonstrable proof that the tools we provide reduce medical errors. Specifically we have seen the reduction of:

  • Wrong surgeries Medical Checklist information
  • Observed-to-expected mortality ratios
  • Surgical infection rates
  • Surgical counts errors
  • Sentinel events
  • Medication errors
  • Medication discrepancies
  • Patient injuries
  • Patient identification discrepancies

Short-term consulting services or out-of-the-box solutions do not provide the level of detail required to uncover problems unique to your facility and develop solutions designed for your staff, your systems, and your hospital's patient safety goals. Our program works.

Contact LifeWings and Start Making Dramatic Improvements at Your Facility

We look forward to hearing from you and learning about your hospital's patient safety goals. Contact us now by: