According to a recent research a simple checklist consisting of basic steps like confirming the patient's name, checking the procedure to be done and even get the doctor's and nurses to introduce themselves can result in significantly lower number of deaths and complications in surgery.

"Surgical complications are a considerable cause of death and disability around the world," the researchers said in The New England Journal of Medicine. "They are devastating to patients, costly to health care systems and often preventable."

The checklist is similar to the one that is carried out by pilots before every flight and this reduced the average patient death rate by more than 40 % and dropped the rate of complications by over a third said the researchers who were a part of the World Health Organization team.

Dr. Atul A. Gawande of the Harvard School of Public Health, senior author of the study said, "The death rate was 1.5 percent before the checklist was introduced and declined to 0.8 percent afterward."

Eight hospitals in Toronto, Seattle, London, New Delhi, Amman, Auckland, Manila and Ifakara in Tanzania with surgical teams operating on more than 7,500 surgical patients were involved led by Dr. Alex B. Haynes of Harvard. All the patients in the study were undergoing non-cardiac surgery at the hospitals and half of them had the surgery before the checklists were introduced while the remainder had the procedure after. They adopted a 19 point checklist and after a year they found the average patient death rate had fallen as had the complication rate.

Dr. Gawande said it was difficult to pinpoint which of the checklist points was the one to have worked. The surgery related death rate ranges between 0.4 % to 0.8 % in the developed world and 17 % of patients have major complications. With the new system the rate of complications fell from the earlier 11 % to 7 %. "Applied on a global basis, this checklist program has the potential to prevent large numbers of deaths and disabling complications," the team reported.

Though some of the items on the checklist seem to be rather obvious but by being extra careful the chances of any careless mistake happening is greatly reduced. "The concept of using a brief but comprehensive checklist is surprisingly new to us in surgery. Not everyone on the operating teams were happy to try it," Gawande said. "But the results were unprecedented. And the teams became strong supporters."

The checklist runs through the nursing staff confirming that everything has been sterilized and all the equipment is present as well as if the patient has been given antibiotics before the surgery and checking on blood supplies. Just before the surgery begins the identity of the patient and the nature of the procedure is confirmed. Post surgery the doctors and nurses review the procedure and discuss any special steps needed to speed recovery as well as check that no equipment has been left in the patient.

The researchers feel the checklists could help many different areas of medicine, including prevention of hospital-acquired infection, cancer treatment and everyday checkups. Some of the hospitals in the study have already begun using the checklist regularly as the changes needed to be made were easy and cost very little.

"The checklists must be short, extremely simple, and carefully tested in the real world. But in specialties ranging from cardiac care to pediatric care, they could become as essential in daily medicine as the stethoscope," Dr. Gawande said.