Surgical Never Event

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Pages: 4

Patients and surgeons who are scheduled to receive or perform surgeries both desire a perfect outcome. Preventable events such as performing the wrong surgery, forgetting a foreign object in a patient, wrong site surgery and many other occurrences have been noticeable in recent years. Surgical never events are costly to the health care system and are associated with serious harm to patients (Mehtsun et al., 2013). It is imperative upon healthcare leaders to address these avoidable events to better serve surgical patients. One of the basic and proven effective ways is to develop a surgical checklist. Implementation of a surgical safety checklist improves perceptions of surgical safety (Papaconstantinou el al., 2015).
Creating a sense of urgency:
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Once the problem is identified it falls upon the leader to implement the change by creating a sense of urgency amongst the employees. A direct method would be to gather the appropriate workforce and present them with the statistics. It will also be helpful if a patient who had suffered from a similar event be part of the presentation. Employees can relate to a patient that is physically advocating for change. A former patient can be contacted through numerous patient advocacy groups.
Building a guiding team: One of the most important steps in ensuring change is being made is gathering the right individuals in a team to help in the implementation process. A representative from all groups involved in developing a checklist should be involved. It is preferred that these group members are well known and respected amongst their peers and this will help in ensuring that other employees will accept the checklist and be part of
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Gaining understanding of and commitment to new directions is never easy, and most managers under-communicate, often "not by a small amount" (Kotter, 2011). That’s the main reason why it’s never a bad idea to “over communicate”. By attaining effective communication, the team and leaders will ensure the delivery of the message. Communication should not be in one direction the team should be open to suggestions and feedback.
Empowering others:
In this step using the 20-60-20 rule developed also known as the Pareto Principle will be very helpful. The first 20% already consists of the original team helping in implementing the new surgical checklist. The following 60% will accept the change once they notice that the original 20% (the original team) consists of well-known members who are reliable and knowledgeable. The remainder will then follow the direction of the majority.

Creating short term