Facilitating Access to Effective Medical Checklists: A Literature Review and Dataverse Expansion Project

Medical settings frequently employ checklists to enhance patient care and clinical processes. However, challenges such as poor checklist design and overreliance can limit the effectiveness of checklist interventions. We expanded a collection of checklists hosted on Borealis, a Canadian academic Dataverse repository, to promote widespread access to tested medical checklists. We collected checklists by searching through the Clinicaltrials.gov, PubMed, and CINAHL databases for relevant articles. Articles were imported into Covidence and screened for eligibility by two reviewers. Articles that studied checklists as the primary intervention and had performance metrics to support the conclusions they made about their outcomes were eligible for inclusion. From 725 retrieved articles, 80 were selected for full-text review after title and abstract screening and 25 met the inclusion criteria. Most studies (n=20) reported that checklists improved outcomes by increasing worker task adherence and care quality, while reducing patient morbidity and readmission rates. However, three studies found checklists to be ineffective and two had inconclusive results. Ultimately, 18 articles describing 16 checklists were added to the Borealis repository; two articles had already been added in the past. The articles added included checklists on safe childbirths, anesthesia administration, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation training. The Borealis repository also had its searchability improved with the addition of keyword filters and Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) terms. There are now a total of 34 checklists available in the repository. As medical institutions often create checklists to support their own processes, enabling widespread access to these can prove beneficial to the greater healthcare community.