Implementation of Safe Surgery Saves Lives initiative in Ahmed ...

2.3 The checklistHealthcare relies greatly on healthcare specialists‟ ability to recall detailed critical informationduring medical practice. However, memory is likely to be error prone, resulting in medical errorsand harm to patients. Many industries, including aviation, factories, operation and maintenancecompanies and nuclear power, attempted to overcome this particular recall limitation bymandating checklists. After examining flight deck checklists, Degani and Wiener in1993identified several advantages regarding effective checklists.Emerton et al. discussed that the teamwork is definable and measurable and can be improvedthrough formal structured communication, such as checklists. They suggested that theirprinciples could effectively be applied to other high-risk industries, such as healthcare, andsurgery in particular (Emerton, Panesar, & Forrest, 2009).A checklist is a tool widely used nowadays, to ensure documentation. It provides a valuabletechnique in error management. And checklist is compulsive part of aviation industry andproduction processes management of factories such as pharmaceutical industries. A checklist canhave several objectives, including memory recall, standardization and regulation of processes,procedures or methodologies. Also it provides a framework for supervision of work andevaluations, and a diagnostic tool. Though, in all uses of checklists the central goal is errorreduction or best practice adherence (Vijayasekar & Steele, 2009). The origins of the checklistdate back to 1935 when a long-range bomber designed by Boeing crashed during a competition.This accident resulted in the death of the most technically gifted pilot on board (Gawande ,2007). A few pilots believed that this catastrophe was a result of a single pilot being forced toremember countless steps before take-off. Consequently, they designed a set of simple step-bystepchecks for take-off, flight, landing and taxiing. This resulted in an accumulation of 1.816