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Volume 23 Supplement 2

London Trauma Conference 2014

  • Meeting abstract
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Could the implementation of a trauma checklist improve quality of care?

Background

Medical error in trauma care remains common [1]. Checklists are a cognitive aid that can be employed to standardise practice and minimise error. Their usage is ubiquitous in other high-intensity professions, such as aviation. Following the success of the World Health Organisation's surgical safety checklist they are now in the process of developing a trauma care checklist. My aim was to evaluate whether a checklist could be applied to the trauma setting to facilitate high quality, standardised care.

Method

  1. 1.

    Audit the prevalence of human factors during trauma calls in a major trauma centre in the UK

  2. 2.

    Literature review of the use of checklists in medicine

Results

  • At least one incidence of negative human factors affecting trauma team performance was observed during each trauma call with the average incidence being three times per resuscitation.

  • Evidence suggests that poor communication is the leading cause of medical error. This was corroborated by my audit findings.

  • A review of literature shows that checklists in are effective tools for standardising care by reducing error and improving compliance with guidelines [2].

Conclusion

It is essential that organisational safety culture is addressed and the subject of human error is acknowledged to improve care provision and enhance patient safety. Checklists represent a promising method of tackling this issue that should be used synergistically with existing management strategies.

References

  1. Cooper DJ, McDermott FT, Cordner SM, Tremayne AB: “Quality assessment of the management of road traffic fatalities at a level I trauma center compared with other hospitals in Victoria, Australia. Consultatitive Committee on Road Traffic Fatalities in Victoria.”. J Trauma. 1998, 45 (4): 772-779. 10.1097/00005373-199810000-00027.

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  2. Thomassen O, et al: “The effects of safety checklists in medicine: a systematic review.”. Acta Anaesthesiol Scand. 2013, 58 (1): 5-18.

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Correspondence to Elizabeth Ashton.

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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Ashton, E. Could the implementation of a trauma checklist improve quality of care?. Scand J Trauma Resusc Emerg Med 23 (Suppl 2), A13 (2015). https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1186/1757-7241-23-S2-A13

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  • DOI: https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1186/1757-7241-23-S2-A13

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