Safe surgery for all☆

he surgical act involves risks and responsibilities for the atient, the surgeon and the hospital at different degrees of ntensity. An interesting practice known as “time out”, forming part f the Safe Surgery project, has been disseminated among ospitals. The idea is to check all the possibilities for failure that ight occur during the surgical procedure and failures due to istakes at different levels of shared responsibility between he hospital, physician and members of the patient’s family, n the case of dependent individuals. Checking all the steps of a procedure is a habit that was orn through aviation. One of the best airplanes of the Secnd World War, the B-17 cargo plane, crashed soon after its rst take-off, even though a very experienced pilot was flying t. On analyzing what had happened, Boeing found that the ilot had not configured the plane before taking off. From then n, a checklist procedure became mandatory within aviation source: The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande). Within surgery, the checking procedure is performed by an mployee of the surgical center, who asks the surgeon (the erson who is considered to hold the sole responsibility of he surgical act) to confirm the patient’s identity, the side to e operated, the implant material to be used, the anesthesia hat will be administered, the sterilization of the instruments nd, finally, whether there will be bleeding and what the likely uration of the operation will be. The majority of the preparatory steps take place indepenently of the surgeon’s action. Thus: