A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that the use of pre-surgery emergency checklists could be instrumental in helping operating room teams manage crises that occur during medical procedures. The study authors arranged for 17 OR teams to go through 196 simulated surgical crises with or without checklists, and that with the lists, the incidence of missing essential steps during emergencies dropped from 23 percent to 6 percent. A big hurdle to adapting checklists, however, is the notion that good OR teams simply do not need them. But when the teams in the study were asked if they would prefer to have checklists on hand, they overwhelmingly said they would.
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