The death rate around operations carried out in Dutch hospitals could be halved if health workers used a check-list outlining procedures and care needs, according to research by Amsterdam University’s teaching hospital.

The researchers identified more than 100 points in the entire surgical pathway where mistakes could be made.
The list was used to assess 4,000 operations carried out in six hospitals and the number of complications fell by one third, the researchers said. The death rate fell from 1.5% to 0.7%.
‘Even we were surprised by the enormous affect on the death rate,’ researcher and surgeon Marja Boermeester told Trouw.
The research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.