Sunday, May 29, 2011

Wait, Doctors don't use checklists?

Atul Gawande gave a commencement speech at Harvard Medical School discussing how to improve the health care system. A central theme is that medicine has grown to be very complex and the doctors don't handle the complexity well. I'm rather surprised that doctor's don't normally use checklists for complicated activities.

It strikes me as obvious that they should. Dr. Gawande has apparently written a book to this effect, too.

There's also reddit discussions for those interested.

Edit: Dr. Gawande has another article about the use of checklists in medicine and the thousands of lives they've saved in very limited application. It sounds like there's not a strong engineering mindset in the medical field.

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