Prevention Matters

"Best and Worst News for Prevention” is based on a purposive sample consisting of expert staff members who each week choose to share their opinions on the best and worst news for prevention.

BEST

Big VA Study Shows Surgery Checklist Saves Lives

Answering such basic questions from surgery checklists — and involving everyone as a team, even patients — saved lives in Veterans Affairs hospitals, according to one of the most rigorous studies of patient safety in the operating room.

Surgery deaths dropped 18 percent on average over three years in the 74 VA hospitals that used the strategy during the study. Surgery team members all created checklists and discussed them in briefings before, during and after surgery. That's a somewhat novel concept in a setting where the surgeon has traditionally called all the shots.


WORST

Americans Still Reaching for the Salt Shaker


Despite constant pleas by public health experts to hold the salt, the sodium intake of the U.S. population hasn't decreased over the past 46 years, according to a new review.

Most of us eat a lot more sodium than is recommended, says researcher Adam Bernstein, MD, ScD, a research fellow in the department of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.


The “Best and Worst” awards are announced each week in “Prevention Matters,” the blog of Partnership for Prevention. "Best and Worst News for Prevention” is based on a purposive sample of expert staff members who each week choose to share their opinions on the best and worst news for prevention. More information is available at http://www.prevent.org/.

A study published online by the New England Journal of Medicine found that, a simple 19-item checklist reduced deaths and complications from surgery by more than a third. The list is requires members of the surgery team to coordinate and confirm their individual understandings and actions and it even includes a surgical team "time out" before incision.

One of the lead authors told NBC News the checklist was expected to produce maybe 10-15 percent improvement, but that he was very surprised to see 38 percent improvement in reduced deaths and complications. And 93% of the surgeons participating in the study said they would want the checklist to be used if they were ever in surgery. As Brady Augustine noted in MedicaidFrontPage, "it seems that our health care system has focused so much on high-tech wizardry, that we have forgotten that the simple things often make the biggest difference."