ASK! Preoperative Safety Checklist Protocol in Interventional Spine Procedures: A Quality Improvement Study Thirty Month Follow-up

Abstract

Medical errors can have devastating consequences for patients. Therefore, it is crucial to prevent sentinel and wrong-side events in order to ensure patient safety. One effective tool for achieving this goal is the World Health Organization (WHO) Surgical Safety Checklist, which can be used in conjunction with a pre-procedural, multidisciplinary checklist and physician-led time-out. In a QI project that focused on interventional pain procedures, a pre-procedural, multidisciplinary checklist and physician-led time-out were implemented. Over a period of 30 months and 5,017 procedures, no near misses or incidents were recorded. These preliminary results suggest that the use of multi-disciplinary checklists and attending-led time outs can significantly improve patient safety in interventional pain procedures.