Safe Surgery Saves Lives

The Safe Surgery Saves Lives initiative provides strategies and tools for reducing deaths and complications from surgery worldwide.

We are supporting the World Health Organization's Safe Surgery Saves Lives initiative to generate global awareness of its importance and inform people that safe surgery contributes to patient safety and the World Health Organization (WHO) Surgical Safety Checklist.

The "WHO Surgical Safety Checklist" is a tool for surgical teams around the world, to ensure:

• operations are carried out at the correct body site
• operations are done with safe anaesthesia
• there are established infection prevention measures
• there is effective teamwork for safer care
• professional endorsement for safer surgical care
• defined measures for better tracking of surgical volume and mortality.

Download a Starter Kit

Download the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist

See Haynes et al. (Jan. 29 issue) report on a surgical safety checklist to reduce morbidity and mortality in a global population. See New England Journal of Medicine’s home page (www.nejm.org) for further information

More information

Further information is available at the WHO page for example access to tools and resources for implementing the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist and the Safe Surgery Saves Lives newsletters etc.

See:  http://www.who.int/patientsafety/safesurgery/en/