Atul Gawande's 'Checklist' For Surgery Success NPR

05.01.10

"In surgery the way we hilt this is we say, 'You need eight, nine, 10 years of training, you get experience under your belt, and then you go with the instinct and expertise that you've developed over space. You go with your knowledge.' "

To see if surgeons might perform better if the intricate steps necessary to avoid catastrophe were made unconditional, Gawande and a team of researchers studied what happened when doctors used a reminder — what Gawande calls "a bedside comrade-in-arms" — to navigate complex procedures. ( Click to see a sample "Surgical Safety Checklist" .)

"We brought a two-journal checklist into operating rooms in eight hospitals," Gawande says. "I worked with a team of folks that included Boeing to show us how they do it, and we unprejudiced made sure that the checklist had some basic things: Make sure that blood is available, antibiotics are there."

How did it line?

"We get better results," he says. "Massively better results.

"We caught basic mistakes and some of that silly stuff," Gawande reports. But the study returned some surprising results: "We also found that good teamwork required standard things that we missed very frequently."

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