so long as clinicians and support staff put blind faith in the client's ability to sex the cat, particularly in this era of pediatric neutering.
As scientific advances expand our knowledge base, it becomes increasingly difficult for healthcare providers to manage the volume and complexity of clinical cases based upon memory alone.
Human‐based errors in medicine and surgery can and will happen to some degree to every veterinary practice and every healthcare provider.
Veterinary medicine can benefit from a risk management tool that has long been employed by the aviation industry – the checklist.
Checklists may seem like “to do” lists that are too simplistic to be of assistance in veterinary practice; however, human healthcare has paved the way in demonstrating that their use helps to reduce medical and surgical errors.
Although checklists are imperfect, they open the door for dialogue about how providers can lessen the chance that an error will occur and jeopardize patient outcomes.
2.4.6 Cautions
Checklists are an imperfect science. At their best, they are concise reminders of key aspects of care; at their worst, they can be cumbersome and inefficient. Checklists must therefore strike a balance between including every step of a task and including too few. Even then, the best checklist can fail. No checklist can prevent every human error from occurring.
So why is it that checklists fail? Checklists require buy‐in from the entire team to be effective [48]. If the team leader has a poor attitude towards the implementation of a given checklist, then it is likely to fail. For a checklist to be effective, it must be consistently used. This means that team members must be properly trained to complete the checklist if it is to become part of practice procedure. Team members must understand the nuances of what they are being asked to do so that completion of the checklist facilitates rather than hinders care. Checklist makers must be open to modifications based upon shared concerns, which means that teams need to be able to speak freely and openly about both the process and their expectations. What is it that the hospital is trying to achieve and why? Is this checklist the best answer to an ongoing hospital problem or is there a better way? Open dialogue will help everyone to get on the same page so that the checklist is customized in a way that suits that individual practice's needs. There is rarely a one‐size‐fits‐all approach to practice management. The checklist can be an effective strategy in the right setting with the right team, provided that there is room for flexibility in its design. Flexibility breeds room for acceptance.
Abbreviation
TPRTemperature, Pulse, and Respiration
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