The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
by Atul Gawande
Holt, 2010. 209 pgs. Nonfiction

A surgeon, associate professor at Harvard Medical School, head of the World Health Organization's Safe Surgery program, and staff writer for the New Yorker, Atul Gawande knows whereof he speaks. In this book it's checklists, not for groceries, Things to Do, books to read, etc., but checklists for projects of extreme complexity such as raising a many-storied building, flying a jetliner, running a high-end restaurant, performing major surgery. The homely, no-tech expedient of a checklist seemed irrelevant to many highly trained professionals who "knew their jobs," but the instantaneous and steep decline in postoperative infections and complications when use of a simple checklist was combined with a team approach brought many hospital administrators on board in the United States and around the world. Gawande himself thought surely he didn't need a checklist until one of his own patients survived a massive hemorrhage only because a nurse had checked an item off her list. Gawande is a fine prose stylist and his message is clear: in critical situations, complexity often yields to simplicity.

LW