My wife would probably agree

Kenneth Hynek • 8th Dec 2008 • Health
Atul Gawande, Canada, ICU, intensive care unit, Michigan, New Yorker, Peter Pronovost, United States

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You know, what with her being a nurse and all:

The New Yorker is running a piece by Atul Gawande that starts by describing the everyday miracles that can be achieved in a modern medical intensive care unit, and ends by making a case for a simple and inexpensive way to save 28,000 lives per year in US ICUs, at a one-time cost of a few million dollars. This medical miracle is the checklist. Gawande details how modern medicine has spiraled into complexity beyond any person’s ability to track — and nowhere more so than in the ICU.

…

The article goes on to profile a doctor named Peter Pronovost, who has extensively studied the ability of the simplest of complexity tamers — the checklist — to save lives in the ICU setting. Pronovost oversaw the introduction of checklists in the ICUs in hospitals across Michigan, and the result was a thousand lives saved in a year. That would translate to 28,000 per year if scaled nationwide, and Pronovost estimates the cost of doing that at $3 million.

I’m actually not sure what’s the more worrying detail here: that at least 28,000 fatal patient-care mistakes are being made every year (in the United States, but I’m sure that it’s just as bad in Canada), or that until now, nobody thought to implement something so elementary as a solution to the problem of oversights.