In reply

Abstract

We thank Dr Glick and Dr Machlin for their thoughtful comments about our audit. 1 The aim of the Stop Before You Block (SB4YB) campaign is to reduce the incidence of wrong-side block. 2 For the SB4YB campaign to be considered a success, we believe two criteria must be met. First, it needs to be demonstrated that it is possible for institutions to achieve a very high level of compliance with a preblock 'time out' moment. Second, it needs to be shown that maintenance of this high level of compliance over the long term is associated with a lower incidence of wrong-side block compared with a control group.Our primary aim was to demonstrate that the first of these criteria was achievable. Prior to our study, the highest compliance rate in the published literature that we identified was 57%. 3 Our post-intervention compliance rate of 91% is a big improvement on this, and we hope that future audits will be able to demonstrate compliance rates closer to the theoretically ideal 100%. We disagree with the suggestion that anything less than 100% is inadequate.