Daily Goals Worksheets and Other Checklists: Are Our Critical Care Units Safer?

In To Err Is Human,¹ the Institute of Medicine (IOM) reported that system failures are responsible for 44 000 to 98 000 deaths of patients each year. Communication issues have been cited as a top safety incident that causes harm in medical and surgical intensive care units (ICUs), with training and team factors as major contributors.² Health care professionals are confronted with multiple communications (pagers, phone calls, wireless phones), interruptions and distractions, escalating noise, and limits to human performance in short-term memory from multitasking and stress/fatigue. Although it may seem that safe communication does not stand a chance against these odds, researchers in a recent ICU study³ found that nurses interrupted 42% of serious errors.

In their 2001 publication, Crossing the Quality Chasm,⁴ the IOM called for radical redesign of the health care system to make it easier for clinicians to keep patients free from...