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Implementation Of A Surgical Safety Checklist, Nicole Stathatos

Master's Projects and Capstones

Lack of standardization in the perioperative area leads to variations in practice that can cause preventable errors. In a 200-bed hospital in Northern California with eleven operating rooms preforming approximately 11,000 procedures a year, there was an increase incidence in sentinel events such as wrong site surgery (n=1), wrong patient surgery (n=1), and retained foreign body (n=5). Safety checks observed in the operating room (OR) were preformed differently among each surgical team and sometimes did not occur at all. Through the use of a Surgical Safety Checklist (SSC), efforts were aimed to standardize safety practices in the OR. The goal …