Importance of a Checklist in a Health Facility - Essay Example

"Importance of a Checklist in a Health Facility" is a perfect example of a paper on care. Nurses face many challenges in their line of duty and especially in the operating room.  Medical errors in the OR occur mostly as a result of a communication breakdown among the caregivers. Medical errors are avoidable and require the ongoing staff to be educated. The problem in most health centers is overlooking the importance of a checklist. The ultimate goal of the checklist is to reduce the frequency of human mistakes in the completion of a complex, multistep task like the C section.  It also helps to improve communication and guarantee a safe and standardized procedures, this means minimizing error (Ohlson, 2008). The Operating rooms are extremely technical environments where presented teams are expected to synthesize, retain, and communicate large amounts of information (Hayes, 2012). It is therefore very important to have a checklist as a human is to error.  Most caregivers in the health centers see the checklist as a time-wasting tool that is outdated but forgets the implications it has especially on patient safety. Many cases of careless mistakes have been reported especially in the OR where even sharp objects such as razors and scissors have been left in the bodies of patients. The effects have been dreadful as one can imagine. All these can be avoided completely if the caregivers and other medical personnel follow a checklist to the letter. Miscommunication between staff members has also resulted due to the failure of using a checklist. Understanding the relationship between effective teamwork by communication and patient safety has been shown to have an impact on understanding the improvement of surgical safety checklist (Hayes, 2012). This improves the running of the duties and consequently the patient safety which is the main role of nurses. The World Health Origination (WHO) has undertaken the first step to cover surgical safety both locally and globally. It has come up with a safety checklist that is to be implemented in all health care facilities. The World health organization safety checklist was developed by a global grouping of specialists gathered by the WHO with the objective of improving the wellbeing of patients undergoing surgical operations around the globe (Hayes, 2012). A list of fifteen journals supports this proposed solution. They are as follows:

1. Nursing 2013
2. American Journal of Nursing (AJN)
3. Nurse practitioner
4. Home healthcare nurse
5. Nurse educator
6. Pediatric emergency care
7. Journal of Nursing Administration (JONA)
8. CIN: Computer, Informatics, Nursing
9. Nursing 2013 critical care
10. Nursing made Incredibly Easy
11. The WHO safety checklist
12. Checklists save lives
13. Teamwork in an Operation Room
14. Operation room guidelines
15. Patient safety

Since its implementation, studies have revealed that Proper use of the checklist reduced the number of communication failures, advanced positive and collaborative team communication. It also reduced delays in the OR, decreased the frequency of communication breakdown that led to these delays, and reduced intra-operative incidents (Nilsson, 2010).

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