The Use of Cognitive Aids in Dutch Operating Theaters; Results from a National Survey

The last decades there is an increased focus on patient safety. Patient safety is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “The absence of preventable harm to a patient during the process of health care and reduction of risk of unnecessary harm associated with health care to an acceptable minimum”. An acceptable minimum refers to the collective notions of given current knowledge, resources available and the context in which care was delivered weighed against the risk of non-treatment or other treatment. The European Board of Anesthesiology (EBA) and the European Society of Anaesthesiology (ESA) published a consensus on what needs to be done/achieved for improvement of perioperative patient safety. During the Euro Anaesthesia meeting in 2010, taking place in Helsinki, Finland, this vision was presented to anesthesiologists, patients, industry and others involved in health care as the ‘Helsinki Declaration on Patient Safety in Anesthesiology’.

One of the first actions of the “Helsinki Declaration Implementation Task Force” (installed by the ESA/EBA) was to produce and promote a series of Crisis Checklists, with the first manual of algorithms for managing clinical crises in anesthesiology issued in 2012. Building upon the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist for normal workflow, multiple groups globally have worked on emergency manuals, including development, simulation testing, clinical implementation studies and training resources.

The recommendations accordant with the Declaration of Helsinki in 2021 on the development and implementation of a crisis checklist, have resulted in an increased use of cognitive guidelines worldwide. Currently, to the best of our knowledge, a cognitive aid has not been implemented and used in all Dutch hospitals. Therefor we want to investigate how many hospitals have implemented and use a cognitive aid and compare these results with previous results from 2018.

We expect an increase in the number of hospitals that have implemented and use a cognitive aid in the OR compared to the number of hospitals in 2018

A one-off questionnaire will be send and won't be repeated. We might contact the participants again, but only if they agree to fill out a second questionnaire

Filling out a questionnaire