Safe-SCOPE Pilot Study: Standardized Checklist Of Patient Information Exchange

The simplest definition of patient safety is the prevention of errors and adverse events to patient associated with health care. While health care has become more effective it has also become more complex, with greater use of new technologies, medicines and treatments. Health services treat older and sicker patients who often present with significant co- morbidities requiring more and more difficult decisions as to health care priorities.

European data, mostly from European Union Member States, consistently show that medical errors and health care related adverse events occur in 8-12% of hospitalization. For example, the United Kingdom Department of health, in its 2000 report "An organisation with a memory", estimated about 850 000 adverse events a year (10% of hospital admissions). Spain (in its 2005 national study of adverse events) and France and Denmark have published incidence studies with similar results.

While 23% of European Union citizens claim to have been directly affected by medial errors, 18% claim to have experienced a serious medical error in a hospital and 11% to be prescribed wrong medication. Evidence on medial errors shows that 50% to 70,2% of such harm can be prevented through comprehensive systematic approaches to patient safety.

Statistics of the World Health Organisation (WHO) show further more that strategies to reduce the rate of adverse events in the European Union alone would lead to the prevention of more than 750 000 harm-inflicted medial errors per year, leading in turn to over 3,2 million fewer days of hospitalization, 260 000 fewer incidents of permanent disability, and 95 000 fewer deaths per years. Our working group clarifies this as very impressive data and statistics.

In aviation checklists are an established instrument to avoid adverse events and so to improve safety. Like in the cockpit also in operating room checklists and briefings can be useful to reduce perceived risks and improve collaboration among operating rooms personnel by controlling safety standards, availability of required sources and responsibility assignment. The World Health Organisation WHO in 2009 established checklist (Save Surgery Saves Lives) is a feasible task increasingly used with individual adaptation. The Implementation has to be ingrained in a hospital wide safety culture with patient safety- related behaviour and perceived personal empowerment. The safe surgery saves lives campaign showed in eight hospitals worldwide with different socio- ecological backgrounds that in around 8. 000 operations mortality and infections rate decreased significantly after using the safe surgery saves lives checklist in operating theatres.