Safe Surgery Saves Lives: The Second Global Patient Safety Challenge

The World Alliance for Patient Safety initiated work on the second Global Patient Safety Challenge in January 2007.The initiative, "Safe Surgery Saves Lives", aims to improve the safety of surgical care around the world.By focusing attention on surgery as a public health issue, the WHO is recognizing the importance of improving the safety of surgical care in all Member States.Major surgery occurs at a volume exceeding the amount of child birth worldwide, yet is much more dangerous and has a much higher mortality rate.The incidence of traumatic injuries, cancers, and other surgical conditions is rising as a proportion of the total global burden of disease, and surgical intervention is expected to increase around the world.Surgical care and its safe delivery can potentially affect the lives of millions of people worldwide.By defining a core set of minimum standards that can be applied universally across borders and settings, the Safe Surgery Saves Lives Challenge hopes to create an environment of safety that will help improve both access to and care of surgical patients.Working groups comprised of experts and clinicians with experience in a broad range of health care settings have been reviewing the evidence for improving safety in surgery.They are now completing work on a set of basic practice standards for perioperative care.The goal will be to improve surgical outcomes for patients regardless of circumstance or environment.Each working group has been focusing on a particular area for improvement in perioperative care: Surgical Site Infection Prevention, Safe Anaesthesia, Safe Surgical Teams, and Measurement of Surgical Care and Quality Assurance Mechanisms.The final product will be a Surgical Safety Checklist that can be used by practitioners interested in promoting safety and improving quality of surgical services.The checklist is designed to be simple and widely applicable.It aims to reinforce established safety practices, and many of the steps are already accepted as routine in facilities around the world.It also aims to foster better communication and teamwork among clinical disciplines.The checklist is intended as a tool for use by clinicians interested in improving the safety of their operations and reducing unnecessary surgical deaths and complications.The individual safety checks have been included based on clinical evidence or expert opinion that their inclusion will reduce the likelihood of serious, avoidable surgical harm and that adherence to it is unlikely to introduce injury or unmanageable cost.