Compliance of WHO Surgical Safety Checklist at a Pediatric Surgical Unit in a Tertiary Level Hospital: A Descriptive Cross-sectional Study

Introduction: The surgical safety checklist by World Health Organization has been used for the last two decades. There is every chance of unwanted expected disasters in operating-room in pediatric surgical cases. Our study is to observe the utilization of the safety checklist in a tertiary level pediatric surgery unit in Nepal. Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was done at Nepal Medical College Teaching Hospital from January 2021-June 2021 with record-based data of children from 0-15 years operated in Pediatric Surgery unit from March 2017-July 2018. Ethical approval (Reference number: 049-077-078) was taken from the Institution review committee of the institute. Convenience sampling was done. Self designed Pro-forma with demographic data along with World Health Organization-Surgical-safety checklist used was collected and entered in Microsoft-Excel. Data were analyzed using Statistical Package-for-the-Social-Sciences-version-25. Point estimate at 95% Confidence Interval was done along with frequency and proportion for binary data. Results: Out of 267 cases enrolled, 103 (38.6%) (35.6-41.6 at 95% Confidence Interval) were fully compliant with the checklist, 69 (25.8%) partially compliant. Among compliant cases, 148 (55.4%) Sign-in part, 128 (47.9%) cases-Time-out part and 152 (56.9%) cases Sign-out part were complete. Conclusions: Compliance with World Health Organization-Surgical-safety-checklist has a major role in preventing morbidity and mortality in Pediatric surgical cases. With proper use of the checklist, the unwanted never-events can be prevented with better surgical outcomes.