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Timeout procedure in paediatric surgery: effective tool or lip service? A randomised prospective observational study
- Source :
- BMJ qualitysafety. 30(8)
- Publication Year :
- 2020
-
Abstract
- BackgroundFor over a decade, the preoperative timeout procedure has been implemented in most paediatric surgery units. However, the impact of this intervention has not been systematically studied. This study evaluates whether purposefully introduced errors during the timeout routine are detected and reported by the operating team members.MethodsAfter ethics board approval and informed consent, deliberate errors were randomly and clandestinely introduced into the timeout routine for elective surgical procedures by a paediatric surgery attending. Errors were randomly selected among wrong name, site, side, allergy, intervention, birthdate and gender items. The main outcome measure was how frequent an error was reported by the team and by whom.ResultsOver the course of 16 months, 1800 operations and timeouts were performed. Errors were randomly introduced in 120 cases (6.7%). Overall, 54% of the errors were reported; the remainder went unnoticed. Errors were pointed out most frequently by anaesthesiologists (64%), followed by nursing staff (28%), residents-in-training (6%) and medical students (1%).ConclusionErrors in the timeout routine go unnoticed by the team in almost half of cases. Therefore, even if preoperative timeout routines are strictly implemented, mistakes may be overlooked. Hence, the timeout procedure in its current form appears unreliable. Future developments may be useful to improve the quality of the surgical timeout and should be studied in detail.
- Subjects :
- Nursing staff
Paediatric surgery
business.industry
Health Policy
Human error
medicine.disease
Pediatrics
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
030202 anesthesiology
Informed consent
Intervention (counseling)
Surgical Procedures, Operative
Medicine
Humans
Observational study
030212 general & internal medicine
Medical emergency
Prospective Studies
Elective Surgical Procedure
business
Timeout
Child
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 20445423
- Volume :
- 30
- Issue :
- 8
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- BMJ qualitysafety
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....b30e63f5c131b47d13bfa42354278811