Grant: Project Grant

Goal: To improve the current surgical safety checklist tool used to decrease complications after surgery Background: Health care errors, including preventable surgical complications, are a tremendous burden to patients and health care systems internationally. The surgical safety checklist was created by the World Health Organization to improve surgical outcomes and decrease morbidity and mortality after surgery. The checklist held significant promise. It performed well in a pilot study but has had variable success in real-life settings. We aim to develop a new point-of-care surgical safety tool and implementation strategy that will reduce surgical complications in Canada and other high-income countries. Methods: This study was developed with integrated stakeholder involvement and will build on our previous and ongoing studies. The first stage will use surveys and interviews of surgical team members to explore aspects that makes surgical safety tools succeed or fail within specific centers. We will explore, in detailed interviews, the strategies developed by successful centers to improve surgical safety. In our second stage, our international team of researchers, knowledge-users and stakeholders will use the information from our previous studies as well as, surveys and interviews to create a new point-of care surgical safety tool. In the third and final stage, we will deploy this tool in three Canadian centers to examine its acceptability to users and its success in improving surgical processes that decrease complications. Expertise: Our team is partnered with the Canadian Patient Safety Institute and includes international research experts in surgical safety research as well as stakeholders and knowledge-users.