RSS 2.0The Power of the Checklist
I’ve long believed in the power of the checklist.
A checklist of “to do” items is a potent tool to help in managing my time, and for accomplishing the most important tasks I need to do in a given day while keeping an easy-reference “registery” of “yet-to-be-done” activities.
When I’m headed out on a long trip, I make up a checklist of what to pack increasing the odds that I end up with a shirt, slacks, and sweater that actually go together. And I’m always reassured when I see the pilot of my plane consulting his printed checklist, and marking off the pre-flight items just as he’s done (hopefully!) on hundreds of previous flights.
Now, there’s strong evidence that having checklist makes a difference in healthcare, too! A worldwide study recently reported in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine says that having – and following – a checklist can cut surgery deaths by 50% and complications by one-third!
The most dramatic gains occurred in developing countries, since many of the items on the checklist are common practice in U.S. hospitals — things like marking the spot for surgery with a bright magic marker, asking the patient their name and what they are in surgery for before administering anesthesia, counting the sponges before closing incisions, etc. All of us have heard horror stories about the occasional episode where the surgeon removes the wrong body part or leaves a small tool inside the body of a patient.
As one of the study authors, Dr. Alex Haynes of the Harvard Public School of Health, said: “Most of these things happen most of the time for most patients, but we need to make it so that all these things happen all the time for all patients, because each slip represents an opportunity for harm.” And in this new age of healthcare consumerism, these slips also represent a risk of reduced business. The proliferation of social networks and Internet data are a real and present danger for all healthcare organizations which I would think makes the checklist all that much more important.
Let’s face it – just because a doctor has done the same procedure many times before, there’s always a chance for a mess-up… they’re human. Once in a while, they may skip a critical step, or forget to do something that causes big problems downstream – is it possible that something as simple as a checklist could be the saving grace? – a critical point to consider as consumers make choices about which hospital and which doctor they will see based on quality data now readily available in our Information Age.
