The Checklist Manifesto
Reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist now being used in medicine, aviation, the armed services, homeland security, investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds.
Stats for nerds
118recommend
245mentions
202people
2010–2026years
55% recommend41% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The author should probably read The Checklist Manifesto. It's a great book that has some excellent advice about getting things done with higher quality by, not surprisingly given the title, using checklists.
- If you enjoyed this you'll likely enjoy the checklist manifesto https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6667514-the-checklist-ma...
- I highly recommend The Checklist Manifesto [1] for a excellent guide on how to construct good checklists.
- > manual checklists [can be] unnecessarily inefficent and/or unreliable
Shoutout to Dr. Atul Gawande's excellent book The Checklist Manifesto, an expansion of his New Yorker article [0]. One of his main points is that even the most competent people forget stupid stuff. He illustrates with examples from surgery, from aviation, from the construction industry, and others. He quotes a saying that aviation checklists are "written in blood."
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist
- Highly recommend reading Atul Gawande's "Checklist Manifesto" [0] if you are interested in the operational results of adding something like checklists to medical care.
Case in point: requiring everyone in the operating room to say their name, specialty and reason for the operation (and their part in it).
You might ask why the above is necessary?
Well:
- everyone is wearing a mask, cap and possibly glasses which makes them hard to recognize
- the patient is often draped in such a way that you can't tell who they are
- many Operating Rooms(ORs) look the same
- there are apparently COUNTLESS stories of medical personnel going into the wrong OR and not realizing until the surgery has started
Another fascinating point about checklists since the OP article mentions doctors vs nurses: checklists give nurses the power to challenge doctors. e.g. "Dr, I believe the next step on the checklist we agreed on is to do X".
If you have no checklist, the Dr can just say "No, we don't need that, I know what I'm doing. Shut up, Nurse!" (this is a real example from the book btw).
He also has an article comparing the Cheesecake Factory to health care that I also highly recommend [1]
- >In his effort to understand hospital safety and risk, he learned these oft-cited projections: more than 200,000 people will die each year from preventable medical errors. He was shocked. Conservatively, these estimates amount to at least one fatal Boeing 747 crash per week, Terblanche calculated.
This reminds me of the book The Checklist Manifesto by surgeon Atul Gawande. The book argues that aviation has achieved such a good safety record largely through the use of checklists, and Gawande describes his attempts to apply them to the field of medicine. Recommended. (Edit: I see that checklists are discussed later in the article; I would still recommend the book, as it has thoughts on how checklists can be applied more effectively.)
