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Keywords:
Quality assurance, Safety, Percutaneous, Professional issues
Authors:
T. A. Ariyanayagam, K. Drinkwater, D. Howlett, P. Malcolm; Norwich/UK
DOI:
10.1594/ecr2017/C-1112
Conclusion
The culture of safety checks in radiology departments in the UK appears quite well established.
Whilst the process is now well embedded in intervention suites there is variable practice in the use of safety checks in other radiology interventions.
Implementation of safety checks is now required in all invasive procedures in the UK.
Checklists are only one aspect of this process.
Most units are now providing information to patients prior to procedures to improve the consent process.
However checklist documentation seems an inevitable part of confirming safe processes and documentation of components such as consent.
Figure 11 + Figure 12 demonstrate our local RIS integrated electronic checklist for ultrasound guided procedures.
An important obstacle to this process is the lack of flexibility of IT systems in enabling the construction and recording of appropriate checklists.
Without this it is difficult to tailor checklists to particular procedures and recording and storing the data is slow and unreliable.
Till this is more widely available it is likely that compliance will be limited.
A second difficulty is that the checklist for intervention suite processes is not well suited to minor invasive procedures.
Appropriate and proportionate process and data collection for minor invasive procedures are needed to overcome this and enable timely checks for the most essential safety processes at short procedures.
The respondents regarded various components of a safety checklist as having variable importance depending on the procedure. This suggests that uniformity of checklists is not a useful objective but that tailored processes are appropriate to particular procedures.
Flexible IT systems are likely to be the greatest obstacle to implementing this approach.