What is The Checklist Manifesto?
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right is a 2009 non-fiction book by Atul Gawande. The book was released on Dec 2009 and was a New York Times Best Seller.
In the book, Atul (who is a surgeon by trade) talks about how many industries across the world use checklists to “get things done right”. He also breaks down his journey as the one of the key champions that brought checklists into hospitals around the world. This endeavor had incredible results. Below is a quote from a post in the New Yorker that talks about the rollout of checklists in just one state, Michigan.
In December, 2006, the Keystone Initiative published its findings in a landmark article in The New England Journal of Medicine. Within the first three months of the project, the infection rate in Michigan’s I.C.U.s decreased by sixty-six per cent. The typical I.C.U.—including the ones at Sinai-Grace Hospital—cut its quarterly infection rate to zero. Michigan’s infection rates fell so low that its average I.C.U. outperformed ninety per cent of I.C.U.s nationwide. In the Keystone Initiative’s first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated $175,000,000 in costs and more than 1,500 lives. The successes have been sustained for almost four years—all because of a stupid little checklist.
The short of the matter is, checklists work. I have written about the power of checklists before when I told the story of how a checklist won World War II. But in today’s day and age, it seems silly to be relying on paper checklists, it only makes sense that as technology evolves we evolve with it.
