Abstract:
Background:
World Health Organization‘s (WHO) patient safety program, ‗Safe Surgery Saves Lives‘ developed a surgical safety checklist (SSC) as a way of improving the safety of surgical care around the world.
The aim of this ‗surgical safety checklist‘ was to give surgical teams a simple, efficient set of priority checks to improve effective teamwork and communication and encourage active consideration of patient safety for every operation performed.
WHO also wanted to ensure consistency in patient safety during surgery and introduce a culture that values patient safety.
Objective: The main of this study was to assess the adherence to the surgical safety checklist among surgical team at selected at district hospitals, Kigali.
Methodology: The cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted.
A census sampling method was applied in this study, with a sample of 100 surgical team members (nurses, anesthetists, midwives and surgeons). The self-adapted questionnaire from WHO‘s surgical safety checklist was used as a data collection tool, the data was analyzed by SPSS, 22.
Results: It was found that the regular use of SSC was at 100 %, however its completeness of all items was at 49.4 %.
The main factors were the uncooperativeness of surgical team while filling the checklist, heavy workload and lack of previous training.
The study showed that more than half of the physicians were not consistently cooperative about the use of checklist.
Conclusions: The adherence of surgical team to SSC in selected district hospital, Kigali was found to be high; however the completeness of all items still has a gap.
The factors hindering its use were the heavy workload, uncooperative team members like some surgeon who consider the surgical safety checklist as wasting the time.
The health policy makers should take measures to increase awareness on the importance of use of SSC so its full use would be increased as well.
The administration of health institution should support the use of surgical safety checklist; more over the team work should be enhanced for effective use of surgical safety checklist.
