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Safe Surgery Saves Lives (WHO Surgical Safety Checklist)

Also: WHO Second Global Patient Safety Challenge · WHO Surgical Safety Checklist

“Safe Surgery Saves Lives”

WHO's Second Global Patient Safety Challenge, which produced the 19-item Surgical Safety Checklist in 2008 - a short read-aloud check before anaesthesia, before incision and before the patient leaves the operating room - and campaigned for surgical teams worldwide to use it.

Years
2008–now
Country
Switzerland
Topic
Patient safety
Asks people to
Start
Strategy
Simple instruction
Channel
Clinical settingPrint
Audience
Clinicians
Surgeons, anaesthetists, operating room nurses and hospital leaders worldwide.

Evidence

Quasi-experimentalPositive

Before-after study in eight hospitals in eight countries, Oct 2007-Sep 2008 (Haynes 2009): deaths fell from 1.5% to 0.8% and inpatient complications from 11.0% to 7.0% after the checklist was introduced. Later population-level studies (e.g. Ontario) found smaller or no effects; WHO cites a reduction of over 30%. Scotland, interrupted time series of all acute admissions 2000-2014 (Ramsay 2019): checklist rollout through the Scottish Patient Safety Programme was associated with a 36.6% relative fall in surgical inpatient mortality, with no matching trend in non-surgical admissions.

Sponsor (who paid)

Credits (who made it)

  • Harvard School of Public Health (Atul Gawande and colleagues) Research evaluation, 2007-2009 source

Sources

  1. Safe surgery (WHO Patient Safety) sponsor
  2. Haynes AB, Weiser TG, Berry WR et al. A surgical safety checklist to reduce morbidity and mortality in a global population. N Engl J Med 360(5):491-9 evaluation · 2009 · DOI 10.1056/NEJMsa0810119 · PMID 19144931
  3. van Klei WA et al. Effects of the introduction of the WHO 'Surgical Safety Checklist' on in-hospital mortality: a cohort study. Ann Surg 2012 evaluation · 2012 · DOI 10.1097/sla.0b013e31823779ae · PMID 22123159
  4. Ramsay G et al. Reducing surgical mortality in Scotland by use of the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist. Br J Surg 2019 evaluation · 2019 · DOI 10.1002/bjs.11151 · PMID 30993676
  5. GlobalSurg Collaborative. Pooled analysis of WHO Surgical Safety Checklist use and mortality after emergency laparotomy. Br J Surg 2019 evaluation · 2019 · DOI 10.1002/bjs.11051 · PMID 30620059
  6. Kim RY et al. Sustainability and long-term effectiveness of the WHO surgical safety checklist combined with pulse oximetry in a resource-limited setting: two-year update from Moldova. JAMA Surg 2015 evaluation · 2015 · DOI 10.1001/jamasurg.2014.3848 · PMID 25806951

Research notes

Clinician-facing campaign. Discovered 2026-10-22 (clinician-campaigns pass). WHO page fetched 2026-10-22 (Second Global Patient Safety Challenge; checklist shown to reduce complications and mortality by over 30%). The Ontario null study (Urbach et al., NEJM 2014) is cited from general knowledge, not fetched - add with DOI after checking. Launch year 2008 from the NEJM study window and WHO guideline publication (2009); verify. Taxonomy gap: topic "patient-safety". Evidence updated 2026-10-22: level observational -> quasi-experimental on Ramsay 2019 (national interrupted time series with a non-surgical comparison series, evaluating the checklist as rolled out); outcome kept positive.

Record cases/who-safe-surgery-saves-lives.json, updated 2026-10-22· Link to this campaign