The Effect of Surgical Safety Checklist on Morbidity and Mortality of Operated Patients in a Public Hospital: A Before-After Study

Surgery is one of the most widely used health care that High levels of morbidity and mortality is attribute to this care, while half of these outcomes are preventable. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effect of surgical safety checklist on morbidity and mortality in operated patients.

The present descriptive-analytical and prospective study was performed in three general steps with before-after method at a public hospital in Tehran. 1604 patients among the operated patients were randomly selected in the control and intervention groups before and after the intervention and their data were extracted based on WHO standardized surgical safety checklist. Statistical analysis was performed using descriptive tests (mean, percentage) and analytical tests (chi-square, paired t-test) by Stata software.

The validity of the study instrument was determined by face validity and its reliability was determined by Cronbach's alpha. According to the results, there was no significant difference before and after the implementation of surgical safety checklist in morbidity and mortality of operated patients (P˃0.05).

The effectiveness of an instrument depends on a set of conditions and using method and the attitude of the staff towards it is very determinative, Therefore, it seems that completing the surgical safety checklist merely as one of the stages of the surgical process cannot improve the situation and reduce the morbidity and mortality of the operated patients.