Articles: checklist.
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Guideline
Checking anaesthetic equipment 2012: association of anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland.
A pre-use check to ensure the correct functioning of anaesthetic equipment is essential to patient safety. The anaesthetist has a primary responsibility to understand the function of the anaesthetic equipment and to check it before use. Anaesthetists must not use equipment unless they have been trained to use it and are competent to do so. ⋯ A two-bag test should be performed after the breathing system, vaporisers and ventilator have been checked individually. A record should be kept with the anaesthetic machine that these checks have been done. The 'first user' check after servicing is especially important and must be recorded.
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Journal of patient safety · Jun 2012
Safety in the home healthcare sector: development of a new household safety checklist.
Unsafe household conditions could adversely affect safety and quality in home health care. However, risk identification tools and procedures that can be readily implemented in this setting are lacking. To address this need, we developed and tested a new household safety checklist and accompanying training program. ⋯ Home healthcare paraprofessionals can be effectively trained to identify commonplace household hazards. Using this checklist as a guide, visual household inspections were easily performed by trained HHCPS. Additional studies are needed to evaluate the reliability of the checklist and to determine if hazard identification leads to interventions that improve performance outcomes.
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Jt Comm J Qual Patient Saf · Jun 2012
Incorporating the World Health Organization Surgical Safety Checklist into practice at two hospitals in Liberia.
The impact of the World Health Organization's Patient Safety Programme's 19-item Surgical Safety Checklist on surgical processes and outcomes was assessed in 2008-2009 at two hospitals in the resource-limited setting of Liberia. ⋯ Although the implementation of a surgical safety checklist in Liberia was associated with significant improvements in processes and outcomes overall, differences at the hospital level suggest that the checklist's mechanism of improvement may be influenced by the availability of resources needed to complete recommended processes, variation in team functioning, and organizational context.
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Clinical Trial
Implementation of an evidence-based extubation checklist to reduce extubation failure in patients with trauma: a pilot study.
This prospective, case-controlled observational study assessed whether an evidence-based extubation checklist would increase anesthesia providers' documentation of standardized extubation criteria and reduce the occurrence of preventable extubation failures in the early postoperative period. The sample consisted of 622 ASA Physical Status I to IV patients, aged 10 to 100 years but primarily adults, who underwent elective and emergency surgeries at a university-based adult trauma teaching hospital. Before the study, all anesthesia and postanesthesia care unit staff received an in-service on adherence to an evidence-based extubation checklist, followed by implementation of the checklist for 12 weeks. ⋯ Following use of the extubation checklist, documentation of patient readiness for extubation increased from 54% to 92.5%, and extubation failures decreased from 2.5 per month to 7.2 per month. This study confirmed that extubation failure occurred less frequently when the extubation checklist was used (P = .001, Fisher exact test). Study results indicate that an extubation checklist may positively influence provider documentation of evidence-based criteria for extubation and can reduce the occurrence of preventable extubation failures.