Marlot Kuiper

19 The challenge of working with checklists Malone et al., 2008; Timmermans & Berg, 2003). For critical care delivery – like surgery – standards like checklists are considered particularly relevant, as the complexity of medical conditions has significantly increased in this environment (Hales & Pronovost, 2006). The specific standard that is the main focus of this dissertation, the Surgical Safety Checklist, is considered the most widely used and cited checklist worldwide (Clay-Williams & Colligan, 2015; Sivathasan et al., 2010). Therefore, it is expected that in this specific domain, the dynamics between a professional logic encompassing notions like autonomy, partnership, and trust, and an organisational logic encompassing notions like managerialism, standardization, and performance assessment become most visible (Evetts, 2011). Given that medicine is widely recognized as a profession with distinctive characteristics, the changes that have occurred in this domain are likely to be indicative of what is also happening in professional organisations in other fields like law and education. Hence, as a researcher interested in standardization of professional work, I selected surgical care as a key case through which such processes could be viewed and explicated best (Patton, 2002). 1.2 Standardization in surgical care as case In surgical care delivery, there has been an explicit shift towards standardization, since the authors of the IOM (1999) report To Err is Human claimed that the number of adverse events 3 was especially high around surgical procedures. In recent years, different groups have therefore investigated and implemented new procedures, specifically aimed at preventing mistakes and improving services in surgical care. The World Health Organisation for example launched its ‘Safe Surgery Saves Lives’ campaign in January 2007. The main goal of the campaign was to improve the safety of surgical care around the world, by finding ways to decrease unwanted variety in surgical care and improve adherence to safety practices (Seme et al., 2010; WHO, 2008). One of the final outcomes of this program, was the Surgical Safety Checklist (SSC). This checklist consists of a series checks that have to be performed right before the delivery of anaesthesia, before incision, and before the patient leaves the operating theatre. 3 An event, preventable or non-preventable, that caused harm to a patient as a result of medical care. 1