New tools for surgical safety are needed in Canada and internationally. Landmark reports such as To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, and the Canadian Adverse Events Study, demonstrate that preventable adverse events contribute significantly to the national burden of illness. Surgical care is responsible for 51.4% of adverse events in hospitals. The global burden of surgical complications led the World Health Organization (WHO) to charge a group of researchers and clinicians, including members of our research team, with the task of developing a strategy to reduce surgery-related deaths globally. The solution devised was the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist (SSC).
In the past ten years, we and others have learned a great deal about the successes and failures of the SSC. This project aims to revise the WHO SSC in High Income Countries (HICs) through a thorough exploration of the unmet needs and untapped potential of a checklist in HICs; a review of the implementation of this surgical tool; operationalization barriers and facilitators; and the international consensus on the SSC. We aim to lead a multidimensional implementation study in Canadian centres to refine the SSC, and follow up with the rollout of an updated SSC across Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.
