Monitoring and assessment of safety barriers in the surgical process through checklist data analysis

Since the publication of the “To Err Is Human” report in 1999 by the U.S. Institute of Medicine, surgery has been one of the fields that received greater attention in developing methods to foster patient safety through a continuous improvement process, and surgery checklists have been proved to be very effective in detecting errors and developing organisational learning towards a safer surgery. The paper describes a model for the reliability analysis of technical and organisational safety barriers in the surgical process, based on data derived from safety checklists that are filled in by anaesthesiologists in the operating room.