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Checklists Complexity

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Checklists
Complexity and its Solution
What do medicine, construction, and aeronautics have in common? They are complex fields that have grown so much since their creation that it is nearly impossible to master everything involved in their respective. To consider the growth look no further than the medical field. Atul Gawande, in The Checklist Manifesto, points out the extreme growth in medicine using Harvard Vanguard, a medical clinic founded in 1969, as an example:
To keep up with the explosive growth in medical capabilities, the clinic has had to build more than twenty facilities and employ some six hundred doctors and a thousand other health professionals covering fifty-nine specialties, many of which did not exist when the clinic first opened…. To handle the complexity, we’ve split up the tasks among various specialties. But even divvied up, the work can become overwhelming. (20)
Harvard Vanguard has not simply had to hire twenty new doctors, it has had to open twenty entire facilities. Fifty-nine new specialties have been created in less a little more than forty years. Since medicine has grown so much and has become …show more content…

Checklists are to ensure mistakes are not made, they should not be a distraction. If a checklist is too long, Gawande states, they become a distraction. Steps get missed or skipped and mistakes get made, so keep the checklist short. It should be five to nine items (Gawande 123). That might seem difficult, if there is a field where a checklist is needed in the first place, won’t the checklist have to be long? The short answer is no; the long answer is to only keep those items that the expert never fails to do. The “killer items” are the items that are dangerous not to do yet are somehow overlooked. Pilots, for example, never fail to let the stewardess know what is happening in an emergency situation, so that does not need to be included in a checklist

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