My firm is planning a group seminar Feb 11/12 in Las Vegas for prior students. If interested drop me a line for more details and pricing.
***
In the spirit of our seminar announcement consider a great article that appeared in The New Yorker on checklists. An excerpt:
We now live in the era of the super-specialist—of clinicians who have taken the time to practice at one narrow thing until they can do it better than anyone who hasn’t. Super-specialists have two advantages over ordinary specialists: greater knowledge of the details that matter and an ability to handle the complexities of the job.
But it’s not enough. Too much can go wrong in the ER. Checklists are the key:
The checklists provided two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes. Pronovost was surprised to discover how often even experienced personnel failed to grasp the importance of certain precautions. In a survey of I.C.U. staff taken before introducing the ventilator checklists, he found that half hadn’t realized that there was evidence strongly supporting giving ventilated patients antacid medication. Checklists established a higher standard of baseline performance.
Pilots were some of the first to get it:
…they came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they created a pilot’s checklist, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing. Its mere existence indicated how far aeronautics had advanced. In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the air might have been nerve-racking, but it was hardly complex. Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing a car out of the garage. But this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of any pilot, however expert.
More:
But, really, does it take all that to figure out what house movers, wedding planners, and tax accountants figured out ages ago?
Yes! That doesn’t mean some like it:
Some physicians were offended by the suggestion that they needed checklists.
Offended? That’s the crazy ego talking. Whether saving patients or making money in the markets, success measured in dollars is the name of the game, not being right or feeling smart. Checklists facilitate profits, bottom line. It’s part of our seminar.
