Cliff Reid & The Resus Room Safety Officer

Cliff Reid has just done a great post over at Resus.me, on the utility of having a dedicated, hands-off, resus room safety officer, whose role is to ensure a checklist of items is monitored during resus, encompassing items such as Environment, Personnel, Patient Transfer to resus room bed, Clinical Plans and Action Prompts, and Patient transfer from the ED.

I think this is an excellent concept, and one which I’d love people to start using and providing feedback (either to Cliff or myself) on.  You can download the checklist from his post here.

A comment was left by Minh Le Cong (from the PHARM blog/podcast) asking why this role is different from the “Team Leader” role (a phrase I’m trying to wean out of discussions regarding resus).  The idea of a dedicated safety officer is to have an individual who is not involved in clinical care or decision making, whose full attention can be focused toward monitoring the environment, group activities, equipment, and communication.  They won’t be distracted by the actual hands-on tasks of the resus, and can focus on ensuring their checklist of high-risk items is completed.

Mark Fitzgerald, Director of Trauma at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, has developed the Trauma Reception and Resuscitation Project, which is a computersied system of prompts that helps clinicians avoid errors of omission in trauma resuscitation, and acts a computerised checklist of sorts, to ensure vital items are not missed, and that at certain points prompts are provided for clinical interventions.  This system was based on research showing that that most errors in trauma resus were simple errors of omission, and that resuscitation errors occurred less frequently when the TR&R system was used (you can see it action, and the references here). I’ve been wondering for a while how this system could be made more widely available (as we can’t have the fancy TR&R computer system installed in every ED in the country…), and I think Cliff’s checklist is a way we can start incorporating this sort of concept into our day to day practice.

What do you think of the idea of a Resus Room Safety Officer?  Would it work in your institution?  What would the barriers to implementing it be? Can you think of any improvements to Cliff’s checklist?