A simple heuristic that's saving lives

Lots of lives.

A group of hospitals in eight cities around the globe has successfully demonstrated that the use of a simple surgical checklist during major operations can lower the incidence of deaths and complications by more than one-third.

It is a simple checklist, to be used at three critical points of the path from admission to discharge from the hospital.

I'm not for every document that makes a marked improvement being called a checklist, but this surely is: a heuristic is a simple mental tool that helps to focus attention on the critical things among a mass of details.

Something so simple, with such impact. Inpatient deaths following major operations dropped by 40% with the use of it. And it was a pretty wide study, not just at a single hospital or a small sample.

By the way, here are the study groups partly tongue-in-cheek videos about using and not using the checklist. I thought they were interesting in themselves. They highlight that the checklist heuristic is not a sure fire, system-in-itself - that it is connected to social practices and it is the whole social system, guided by the heuristic that delivers the improvements.