Surgical Safety Checklist

Safety in the OR

The World Health Organization (WHO), started the Safe Surgery Saves Lives initiative to reduce the number of deaths caused by surgery. There are specific check marks to follow before surgery, immediately before surgery in the OR, after the surgery is finished, and report back to the patient and family after surgery, proven by evidence-based practices. “The Checklist is intended to give teams a simple, efficient set of priority checks for improving effective teamwork and communication and to encourage active consideration of the safety of patients in every operation performed” (“Implementation Manual Surgical Safety Checklist”, n.d). Every one of these is very important to improve patient safety, but specifically one checkmark

I saw today was very important in preventing unnecessary infection or additional surgery- the counting of the equipment before and after surgery. Today, before the patient was about to be closed the nurse and the surgical assistants were counting the equipment to make sure there was not one item left in the patient, and they noticed that there was a scratch pad missing. The surgery was put on pause, while everyone looked for this pad. We looked for approximately fifteen minutes and could not find the pad so the resident told the nurse to call X-ray to come to make sure it was not in the patient’s skull. Luckily, before X-Ray came we noticed it was stuck to the resident’s uniform. This experience showed me how important it is to count the equipment because if it were not for double checking, it would be very easy to close a patient who still has equipment in him.
Nurses’ roles in the operating room are very different from the other nurses’ roles I have observed and performed in clinical.

Their number one job is to make sure the patient is safe similarly to every other nurse’s job. This is done by ensuring the patient checklist is being completed thoroughly and speaking up when something has not been checked off. The nurse accomplishes this by being knowledgeable in the QSEN safety competency and being the patients advocate for ensuring the team is safe when the patient is under anesthesia. Secondly, from observing today, the nurse also was responsible for obtaining equipment the surgeon needed. From my experience, today I learned the significance of a nurse’s job of to the checklist. Even though it can be annoying to count every tool it is critical in the OR and even in other fields. Comparing the WHO checklist to the one used at Mayo I did not see any big differences which is essential from a patient safety standpoint. When walking the surgical halls and in the locker-room, there were signs everywhere that showed how many days there has been since a piece of equipment was left in a patient. The hospital has gone one hundred and twenty-seven days. Which is not that many days, I thought it was nearly impossible to leave equipment in a person, but from my first observation my perspective of that changed. Today, I learned a significant about craniotomies but the main point I learned was the importance of patient safety even though I have been reminded constantly on this since the beginning of my nursing

classes.