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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- A surgical safety checklist can reduce the rate of complications and even death by more than one third a new study shows.
Major complications occur in 3 to 16 percent of inpatient surgeries in industrialized countries. An international pilot study involving the Toronto General Hospital (TGH) and seven hospitals around the world tested a Surgical Patient Checklist. A member of the surgical team referred to the checklist at three critical points during surgery: before anesthesia, immediately after incision and before the patient exited the operating room.
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Using the checklist reduced the rate of major complications in the involved operating rooms by 4 percent and inpatient deaths after operations dropped by 40 percent.
"We know that many surgical complications are preventable," Dr. Bryce Taylor, co-author of the study and Surgeon-in-Chief at University Health Network in Toronto, was quoted as saying. "With approximately 234 million surgeries performed each year worldwide, we owe it to our patients to look at every opportunity to prevent complications during and after surgery."
SOURCE: New England Journal of Medicine, published online January 14, 2009
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