Safety in surgery is a system, not a promise — and you are entitled to see how it works.
This is the institutional quality and surgical safety service of Chongqing West District Hospital’s Plastic Surgery & Aesthetics Medical Center. It explains how an operation is made as safe as it can reasonably be made: the checklist worked through before, during and after surgery; how a surgeon’s licence, scope of practice and hospital privileges differ; how instruments are sterilised and implants recorded; and how a department reviews what went wrong and changes what it does.
No hospital can promise a complication-free outcome, and this site does not pretend otherwise. What it can do is describe the systems that reduce risk, state their limits honestly, and tell you what to ask about before you commit to anything.
- Surgical safety checklist
- Credentialing and scope explained
- Audit and adverse-event review
- Tertiary-hospital support
Safety that can be described, checked and reviewed
A claim of safety that cannot be described is not a safety system. These are the three things this centre can describe about how an operation is run, and the same three things you should expect any hospital to be able to describe.
Standardise the steps
Identity, site, side, consent, allergies, airway, prophylaxis and implant readiness are confirmed as a team routine rather than from individual memory, at fixed points in the operation. Standardising the steps is what makes an omission detectable at all.
Record what was used
Instruments are processed, monitored and labelled by cycle; specimens are labelled; every implant is recorded with its manufacturer, model and lot number, and the record is given to the patient. Traceability is what makes a future problem answerable rather than a search.
Review what went wrong
Complications are counted, discussed without defensiveness, and answered with a change that can be described. The honest measure of a department is not a clean record; it is how it responds when something goes wrong, and whether it can say what it changed.
The clinicians accountable for safety in this centre
The leadership of the Plastic Surgery & Aesthetics Medical Center — surgical planning, plastic and reconstructive surgery, skin and laser care, and dermatology — practicing inside Chongqing West District Hospital, a tertiary general hospital. Each of them is credentialed by the hospital for the procedures they perform here.
Shaoliang Wang, MD (王韶亮)
Plastic Surgery · Center Director
Center Director and the surgical backstop of the team: revision of failed operations from elsewhere, excision of skin tumours, complex wound repair, and the judgement of when a plan should not proceed. He is the medical reviewer for every safety guide published on this site.
View profile →
Tongchun Mao, MD (毛彤春)
Deputy Director · Surgical Planning
Deputy Director and head of aesthetic surgery; he leads the assessment and sequencing decision for each patient, including the decision to stage work across visits rather than combine it in one session.
View profile →
Ke He, MD (何锞)
Skin & Laser Aesthetics · Deputy Director
Deputy Director and head of skin and laser aesthetics; she leads the skin-quality work that comes before a procedure and the laser-based aftercare that follows it, including the preparation that influences how a wound heals.
View profile →
Yongbo Jia, MD (贾勇波)
Dermatology · Deputy Director
Deputy Director and head of dermatology; he manages the medical condition of the skin — preoperative assessment of anything that affects healing, barrier and pigment control, and the dermatologic care that protects a result afterwards.
View profile →Quality and safety, explained honestly
These guides are the education behind the consent conversation: what a surgical safety checklist actually does, how credentials and scope of practice differ, how instruments and implants are controlled, how a department reviews a complication, and what you are entitled to ask before you agree to anything.
How Surgical Safety Is Managed: The Checklist Approach
What a surgical safety checklist is for, how it is used before, during and after an operation, and the honest limits of what any checklist can prevent.
Read the guide →Verifying Surgeon Credentials and Scope of Practice
What a medical licence and a scope of practice actually mean, how hospital credentialing works behind the scenes, and what a patient can reasonably check before committing.
Read the guide →Infection Prevention and Control in the Operating Theatre
How sterile fields, instrument processing and antibiotic prophylaxis work together to reduce surgical site infection, and what each of them can and cannot do.
Read the guide →Implant and Device Traceability: The Record That Follows You
Why the record of which implant or device was used in your body matters for your lifetime, what a traceability record contains, and how to obtain and keep it.
Read the guide →Complication Review and Audit: How a Department Changes Practice
How case review, morbidity and mortality meetings and audit cycles turn complications into changes in practice, and what makes that process real rather than nominal.
Read the guide →Reporting and Investigating Adverse Events: What to Expect
What should happen when something goes wrong during or after treatment: how adverse events are reported, how they are investigated, and what a patient is entitled to be told.
Read the guide →We will not sell you a safety guarantee we cannot give
No hospital can promise a complication-free outcome, and no checklist, sterilisation cycle or audit removes risk entirely. What these systems do is reduce a defined set of harms and make the rest visible. Outcomes also depend on your own healing and anatomy, which no provider controls. This site therefore describes systems rather than promising results, and states plainly that the honest measure of a department is how it responds when something goes wrong.
Ask how safety is managed before you commit
We would rather answer a difficult question now than explain a complication later. Tell us the procedure you are considering and we will describe how it is credentialed, how the theatre is run, what is recorded, and what the department does when something does not go as planned — including the honest limits of all of it.
Part of Choosing a Clinic — 6 sites on this topic