Hospitals in pursuit of excellence

Building a Better Time-Out

A wrong-site surgery on a toe was the catalyst for a comprehensive new surgical time-out initiative at University of Minnesota Medical Center at Fairview. , ?It?s not as catastrophic as some of the cases you may have read about, but it was catastrophic for the patient,? says Carol Hamlin, RN. While the hospital had already been using time-out procedures for several years, a root-cause analysis of the wrong-site surgery revealed that time-out protocol varied widely. The medical center subsequently developed a new, standardized Safe Surgery Process that used human factors systems design methodology to build a new framework for pre-surgical time-outs. The system has proved effective?the hospital has experienced no wrong site, wrong patient or wrong procedure events since January 2009, while steadily improving its compliance rates with every step of the Safe Surgery Process. For more information, contact Carol Hamlin at chamlin1@fairview.org.