Emergency Care Checklists
Overview
The simple integration of a checklist in clinical care has been shown to be affordable, effective to improve patient care and decrease medical errors. The Emergency Care Checklists are simple one-page tools designed to be used in Emergency Units during care of acute patients. The tools utilise a structured approach to ensure provision of key life-saving elements of initial medical and trauma care. The checklists are designed to aid clinicians in reviewing key actions at critical points during their care of a patient, after the primary and secondary survey and again before the team leaves the patient. The Emergency Care Checklists are intended to be applied to those patients requiring emergent interventions (e.g. all patient triaged to high level of acuity). The Trauma Care Checklist has been applied in multiple settings and shown to improve care process measures in real world testing and reduce in mortality for those with the most severe injuries, including in resource limited environments.1