Compliance to use of surgical checklist among private medical practitioners

Surgery put patients at appreciable risk of adverse outcomes and death. Operative Surgical Checklists serves as an aid-memoire to ensure patients’ and health care personnel safety during the perioperative period. A cross-sectional survey of private medical practitioners (PMP) was conducted to find out about the awareness and compliance of general medical practitioners in Nigeria on the use of WHO Surgical Checklists. Relevant data were obtained through a pre-tested paper based questionnaire. One hundred and nineteen questionnaires were analysed. The mean age of the respondents was 58.20 (±4.761) years. The mean duration of time from post qualification was 31.083 (±4.387) years. Twenty-four (20.16%) of the respondents have additional qualifications in various clinical and non clinical specialties. Forty-seven (39.49%) of the respondents had heard about surgical checklist mainly from the internet. Only 5 (10.63%) of them use it, and in less than 25% of the occasions. Use of checklist shows no significant statistical difference between those with additional qualifications to those without (p= .6970).  About 96% of the respondents believed that surgical checklist is beneficial. The most barrier to use of surgical checklist was unavailability of the checklists. Surgical checklist is poorly utilized by the private medical practitioners.  We suggest the need to further emphasize the use of surgical checklists at various levels of our practices.Keywords: Surgical checklist, World health organization, private medical practitioners and Operation