Background: Exchanging and sharing information within the anesthesia team is very important to maintain patient safety and requires close coordination and cooperation between team members. The aim of this study was to introduce and present a checklist before induction of anesthesia and to evaluate its effect on improving the clinical performance of the anesthesia team and the quality of patient safety.
Methods: This quasi-experimental study was a post-test with a control group. The statistical sample of the study included anesthesia teams in four educational centers of Ahvaz, including anesthesiologists and experts who were selected by convenience sampling and randomly assigned to two groups of intervention (n = 50) and control (n = 50). After applying the designed checklist before induction of anesthesia in the intervention group, data collection was performed by the Patient Safety Attitude Questionnaire completed by the participants themselves.
Results: The results showed that the mean score of safety attitude in the intervention group (4.01) was significantly higher than the control group (3.91) (P=0.012). 80.2% of the respondents in the intervention group stated that using the checklist was easy, while only 19.8% of them considered using the checklist to be time consuming. The majority agreed that the use of checklists improved operating room safety, communication and prevented errors in the operating rooms (80.2%, 84.8% and 78.6%).
Conclusion: The use of checklist intervention leads to improved team clinical performance and safety of the operating room environment and can play a valuable role in promoting patient health and greater productivity of anesthesia staff.

Keywords: Checklist, anesthesia, patient safety, teamwork

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