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The Checklist

Colin Campbell
by Colin Campbell on 06/12/19 18:00
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The likelihood is that you will end up with so many checklists that you will need a checklist for your checklists.

One of the most important ones we have in our practice is what we call the “W.H.O checklist”.

This was the concept given to us in the book by Atul GawandeThe Checklist Manifesto”.

The concept of the W.H.O surgical checklist is astonishing, the lives that it has saved and the people who it has protected is quite extraordinary. Both in the developing world and the developed world (whatever that might be).

For us, at least for Louise and I at the practice, we transformed it a little bit from the W.H.O checklist into our own checklist for surgery and if you would like a copy of it, just hit reply and I will make sure Louise sends it to you.

It is pretty simple really; we ask the patient their name and their date of birth and we ask them to tell us what we’re doing for them that day and to point exactly to where it is.

We check their medical history thoroughly, we try in a surgical guide and we give them the tablets that they are supposed to have, we check that they have taken the tablets that they were supposed to have taken and they rinse their mouth.

While we are setting up surgery, we identify who the surgeon is and we identify who the nurse is and the surgeon and the nurse identify what the procedure is and what the anticipated problems are.

We check that we have everything that we said we were going to have and we carry out the procedure.

Afterwards we check the patients had their tablets, we check what complications they’ve had, we check that the x-rays are done and the appointments are done etc, etc, etc.

At the end we sign it to say we did it and we also mark to see whether we filled out a small incident form that we call a black box form, which we do to try and make things better.

Amidst of the appointment the surgical checklist probably takes about 90 seconds in total, but it changes the game.

Firstly it makes us go through things systematically and I am not good for systematically, so it forces me to do it.

Secondly, it builds a culture of development, it makes us look at what we’re doing and what we’ve done and if it goes wrong, or there is something that we can learn from, then we note it down and it is passed through a system to make it better.

Thirdly, it shows us the things that aren’t going well and brings joy in fixing them to make it go right.

It shows us that money is less important than being good and it means that if you become good then the money will follow.

We’re examining systems all over the place in our practice at the moment and trying to push through a marginal gain after marginal gain, just to make things a little bit better.

There is not much that we’ve done in the last few years that is better than the checklist.

Blog Post Number - 2208

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Colin Campbell
Written by Colin Campbell
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