Doctor's checklist 'reduces mortality'
Thursday 23rd June 2011
Death rates could potentially be reduced in intensive care units if doctors are given a checklist to keep track of important tasks and details, research has indicated.
A team from Northwestern Medicine found that the mortality rate dropped dramatically by 50 per cent when the attending physician in the intensive care unit had a checklist and a trusted person prompting him to pay attention to issues on the checklist that were being overlooked.
The study, published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, was designed to investigate whether prompting physicians to use a checklist would affect their decisions they made surrounding patient care.
Curtis Weiss of Feinberg School of Medicine said: "Attending physicians are good at thinking about big picture issues like respiratory failure or whatever diagnosis brought a patient to the intensive care unit, but some important details are overlooked because it's impossible for one person to remember and deal with all those details."
This comes after research published in the International Journal of Clinical Practise revealed that badly coordinated medical care is linked to an increased risk of drug and medical errors in a new study.
Written by Mathew Horton
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