ABSTRACT
In healthcare there is now growing interest in checklists, particularly in acute hospital settings, to standardize checking processes and act as cognitive aids to ensure task completion by clinicians and others, and provide further systemic defences against error and preventable harm to patients (Ko et al., 2011). In UK general medical practice, it is estimated patients may be avoidably harmed in between 1% to 2% of clinical consultations, which is potentially significant given that there are approximately 1 million consultations daily (Health Foundation, 2013). The nature, scale and organisation of patient care in general practice are characterised by an inherent complexity and uncertainty due in large part to the diverse range of (often elderly) patients who are living longer with increasingly complicated co-morbidities and often taking multiple high risk medications; making safe and effective clinical management particularly problematic (Barnett et al., 2012).
