Articles: checklist.
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Health care delivery systems are inherently complex, consisting of multiple tiers of interdependent subsystems and processes that are adaptive to changes in the environment and behave in a nonlinear fashion. Traditional health technology assessment and modeling methods often neglect the wider health system impacts that can be critical for achieving desired health system goals and are often of limited usefulness when applied to complex health systems. Researchers and health care decision makers can either underestimate or fail to consider the interactions among the people, processes, technology, and facility designs. ⋯ This report assists researchers and decision makers in deciding whether these simulation methods are appropriate to address specific health system problems through an eight-point checklist referred to as the SIMULATE (System, Interactions, Multilevel, Understanding, Loops, Agents, Time, Emergence) tool. It is a primer for researchers and decision makers working in health care delivery and implementation sciences who face complex challenges in delivering effective and efficient care that can be addressed with system interventions. On reviewing this report, the readers should be able to identify whether these simulation modeling methods are appropriate to answer the problem they are addressing and to recognize the differences of these methods from other modeling approaches used typically in health technology assessment applications.
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Anesthesia and analgesia · Jan 2015
An electronic checklist improves transfer and retention of critical information at intraoperative handoff of care.
Communication failures are a significant cause of preventable medical errors, and poor-quality handoffs are associated with adverse events. We developed and implemented a simple checklist to improve communication during intraoperative transfer of patient care. ⋯ An electronic checklist improved relay and retention of critical patient information and clinician communication at intraoperative handoff of care.
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Multicenter Study Observational Study
Measuring variation in use of the WHO surgical safety checklist in the operating room: a multicenter prospective cross-sectional study.
Full implementation of safety checklists in surgery has been linked to improved outcomes and team effectiveness; however, reliable and standardized tools for assessing the quality of their use, which is likely to moderate their impact, are required. ⋯ We found large variation in WHO checklist use in a representative sample of English ORs. Measures sensitive to checklist practice quality, like CUT, will help identify areas for improvement in implementation and enable provision of comprehensive feedback to OR teams.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
A cluster randomized trial of a multifaceted quality improvement intervention in Brazilian intensive care units: study protocol.
The uptake of evidence-based therapies in the intensive care environment is suboptimal, particularly in limited-resource countries. Checklists, daily goal assessments, and clinician prompts may improve compliance with best practice processes of care and, in turn, improve clinical outcomes. However, the available evidence on the effectiveness of checklists is unreliable and inconclusive, and the mechanisms are poorly understood. We aim to evaluate whether the use of a multifaceted quality improvement intervention, including the use of a checklist and the definition of daily care goals during multidisciplinary daily rounds and clinician prompts, can improve the in-hospital mortality of patients admitted to intensive care units (ICUs). Our secondary objectives are to assess the effects of the study intervention on specific processes of care, clinical outcomes, and the safety culture and to determine which factors (the processes of care and/or safety culture) mediate the effect of the study intervention on mortality. ⋯ This is a large scale, pragmatic cluster-randomized trial evaluating whether a multifaceted quality improvement intervention, including checklists applied during the multidisciplinary daily rounds and clinician prompting, can improve the adoption of proven therapies and decrease the mortality of critically ill patients. If this study finds that the intervention reduces mortality, it may be widely adopted in intensive care units, even those in limited-resource settings.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Use of a checklist during observation of a simulated cardiac arrest scenario does not improve time to CPR and defibrillation over observation alone for subsequent scenarios.
Immersive simulation is a common mode of education for medical students. Observation of clinical simulations prior to participation is believed to be beneficial, though this is often a passive process. Active observation may be more beneficial. ⋯ Observation alone leads to improved performance in the management of a simulated cardiac arrest. The active use of a simple skills-based checklist during observation did not appear to improve performance over passive observation alone.