First Technical Working Group Meeting
"Safe Surgery Saves Lives"
As a follow up to the First Consultation of the Second Global Patient Challenge, Safe Surgery Saves Lives, in January 2007, the Technical Working Group Meeting of this programme took place in London, 18-20 April.
The First Consultation concluded with a decision to create a tool in the form of a checklist – the Surgical Countdown – to implement basic interventions to improve the safety of surgery. The consultation validated the themes of "Clean Surgery" and "Safe Anaesthesia". The discussion of “Safe Operators” revolved around improving teamwork amongst all providers. A measurement system is indisputably essential, and will have the benefit of facilitating improvement by the very fact of its implementation.
The first Technical Working Group Meeting aimed to:
- establish the working relationships of the technical groups based on the themes of: clean surgery, safe anaesthesia, safe surgical teams, and measurement;
- determine the minimum standards that might be included in the Surgical Countdown;
- assign responsibility for the creation of the technical background documents to the various members for subsequent work.