Quality improvement in Respiratory Medicine: Designing and implementing a bronchoscopy checklist at Southend University Hospital

There is currently no standardised procedure checklist for bronchoscopies in the United Kingdom. Furthermore, very few hospitals appear to routinely use any form of checklist for these procedures. Conversely, the World Health Organisation surgical checklist has become standard practice in most hospitals, our own included, for all surgical procedures. Based on our own needs, we decided to create a bronchoscopy checklist which could be used at our hospital with the primary emphasis on ensuring patient safety and improving clinical outcomes. We surveyed local surgical checklists as well as endoscopic checklists used in hospitals around the world. We then created an initial draft which was sent out to consultation to all Respiratory Physicians in our hospital. Comments were also taken from the endoscopy nursing staff. After a series of consultations, a checklist was trialled over the course of two weeks. Feedback from use in the endoscopy suite resulted in further modifications and a final version of the checklist came into use in May 2013. It is now used for all bronchoscopic procedures carried out by Respiratory Physicians in the hospital. An audit is planned for later this year to monitor uptake of the checklist and to determine if it has changed outcomes.