How much and what local adaptation is acceptable? A comparison of 24 surgical safety checklists in Switzerland (April 2021)

Summary

In 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) published the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist, and 3 years later, the Swiss Patient Safety Foundation adapted it for Switzerland. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews showed ambiguous results on the effectiveness of surgical checklists. Most of them assume that the study checklists are almost identical, but in fact they are quite heterogeneous due to adaptations to local settings. In this study, Fridrich et al. aims to investigate the extent to which the checklists currently used in Switzerland differ and to discuss the consequences of local adaptations.