Over the past 20 years, office-based surgery has shown an exponential increase in both the number and complexitys of patients and types of procedures. Fortunately, serious O.R. crises are rare in the office-based surgical (OBS) setting, but when they do occur, both anesthesia and non-anesthesia practitioners must be well equipped to provide the best possible care for the patient. Given these patient safety concerns, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently added the use of a World Health Organization (WHO)-type safe surgery checklist for routine procedures, and used before a procedure starts, as a measure of quality for ambulatory surgery centers. Another type of checklists includes emergency checklists with treatment algorithms, like the advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) algorithm, which are often encountered in the O.R. and hospital wards.
However, checklists need not only be used in O.R. settings. Checklists can be modified and carried out success-fully in the...