A Surgical Safety Checklist to Reduce Morbidity and Mortality in a Global Population.¶
Haynes, A. B., Weiser, T. G., Berry, W. R., Lipsitz, S. R., Breizat, A. S., Dellinger, E. P., Herbosa, T., et al. (2009). A Surgical Safety Checklist to Reduce Morbidity and Mortality in a Global Population. New England Journal of Medicine, 360(5), 491-499.
Cited by¶
7 citations across 7 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Authentication
- The admissible evidence channels are something-held (a wristband encoding the patient's identifier) and something-inherent-plus-attested (the patient's own verbal confirmation of name and date of birth, attested against the chart) — a deliberately two-channel procedure.
This sourceDocuments the WHO pre-operative time-out, a multi-channel patient-identification procedure (wristband plus verbal confirmation against the chart) anchored at admissions intake.
- The admissible evidence channels are something-held (a wristband encoding the patient's identifier) and something-inherent-plus-attested (the patient's own verbal confirmation of name and date of birth, attested against the chart) — a deliberately two-channel procedure.
- Cognitive Offloading
- They recur in pre-literate societies adopting writing, in pilots adopting checklists, in teams adopting shared documents, in laboratories adopting notebooks, in mathematicians adopting notation, and in surgeons adopting safety checklists.
This sourceDocuments the surgical safety checklist, adapted from aviation, externalizing verification onto a read-back list and cutting deaths and complications.
- They recur in pre-literate societies adopting writing, in pilots adopting checklists, in teams adopting shared documents, in laboratories adopting notebooks, in mathematicians adopting notation, and in surgeons adopting safety checklists.
- Confirmation Dialog
- Confirmation dialogs in software ("Are you sure you want to delete?"), the surgical pre-incision timeout, the launch second-key protocol, cooling-off periods in consumer credit, the legislative second reading, and the aviation challenge-and-response checklist are all instances of the same pattern: introduce a structurally enforced moment of re-deliberation immediately before a step from which retreat is costly or impossible.
This sourceReports the measured mortality and complication reductions following rollout of the WHO surgical safety checklist with its spoken pre-incision Time Out.
- Confirmation dialogs in software ("Are you sure you want to delete?"), the surgical pre-incision timeout, the launch second-key protocol, cooling-off periods in consumer credit, the legislative second reading, and the aviation challenge-and-response checklist are all instances of the same pattern: introduce a structurally enforced moment of re-deliberation immediately before a step from which retreat is costly or impossible.
- Time-Of-Check To Time-Of-Use Flaw
- A database compare-and-swap is structurally the same move as a pre-incision surgical time-out: both rebind the action to the state present at the moment of action.
This sourceDemonstrates the pre-incision time-out checklist reduces surgical complications and deaths.
- A database compare-and-swap is structurally the same move as a pre-incision surgical time-out: both rebind the action to the state present at the moment of action.
- Turn Taking
- The prime makes the failure modes legible as structural, not personal: a room where a junior member never speaks up about a concern is starvation of a quiet contender under a dominance-prone self-selection rule, and the documented fix is exactly the prime's family — switch rule families by instituting a checklist that pre-allocates a turn to each role ("anaesthesia, any concerns?"), converting contention into round-robin so the quiet contender is guaranteed the floor.
This sourceThe WHO surgical safety checklist pre-allocates a speaking turn to each role, converting contention to round-robin.
- The prime makes the failure modes legible as structural, not personal: a room where a junior member never speaks up about a concern is starvation of a quiet contender under a dominance-prone self-selection rule, and the documented fix is exactly the prime's family — switch rule families by instituting a checklist that pre-allocates a turn to each role ("anaesthesia, any concerns?"), converting contention into round-robin so the quiet contender is guaranteed the floor.
Mechanisms¶
- Lesson-to-Routine Hardening
- Its strength is that it closes the gap between agreeing with a lesson and acting on it, by moving the behavior into a durable external form — the logic behind the safety checklist, which reliably prevents lapses on steps experts fully know but predictably skip under load.
This sourceFinds that a surgical safety checklist improved completion of measured safety steps and was associated with lower complications and mortality.
- Its strength is that it closes the gap between agreeing with a lesson and acting on it, by moving the behavior into a durable external form — the logic behind the safety checklist, which reliably prevents lapses on steps experts fully know but predictably skip under load.
- Readiness Checklist
- The checklist
This sourceShows that a 19-item surgical checklist reduced omissions of critical safety processes and improved outcomes across eight hospitals.
- The checklist
Verification¶
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Links previously used in the corpus¶
Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.
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