 In January of 2007, the World Health Organizations WHO World Alliance for Patient Safety initiated a project called Safe Surgery Saves Lives to identify minimum standards of surgical care that can be universally applied across countries and settings. Through a two year process involving international input from surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, infectious disease specialists, epidemiologists and others, the WHO created a surgical safety checklist that encompasses a simple set of surgical safety standards that can be used in any surgical setting. Each safety step on the checklist is simple, widely applicable, and measurable. The Surgical Safety Checklist was piloted in 8 hospitals around the world and results demonstrated a significant decrease in death rate and postoperative complications. 