The Atul Gawande’s article, ” The Checklist” published in the Annal of Medicine December 10 2007 Issues, outlines Doctors Peter Pronovost’s work in medical field. The author relates to many medical situations within hospitals with emphasis on the intensive care unit. Pronovost was among the first to recognize the power of using a checklist. Using a checklist can save lives in the ICU. It was a surprise to me that Spain was willing at adopt Pronovost’s checklist idea while only a few hospitals in the US have opted to do so. Routine steps can be easily missed or forgotten without using a checklist as shown by many of Pronovost’s experiments .

In the article “The Checklist” written by Atul Gawande, the author introduces that how to apply the checklist to the ICU management. As the author explains, in some complex process suck as IC in the hospital, there are always some error actions in thousands of steps and that causes the surviving rate decreased. Later, the checklist was used. And nurses and doctors whose actions followed the checklist saved more people. And finally he got a conclusion that the checklist is widely used and saved a lot of people’s lives. And I think also the checklist can be used in development of software.

Atul Gawande’s checklist was very intense topic regarding intensive care and the will to treat patients with the maximum effort. reading this paper, I was very moved by the story of the little girl in Australia that fell into the pond. it was amazing how these doctors never gave up on her after she was technically dead for 2 hours. these doctors came up with carefully detailed steps from a short amount of time to bring her back to life.

The checklist was a moderately interesting piece to read. The title had a lot of ambiguity due to the fact that it never tells you what it is a checklist of before you begin to read. The assigned reading felt like a story the way it developed and transitioned from different ways that a checklist in an ICU could have an affect on survival rates. When the author broke down the use of the new airplane by the US government and how a checklist made something deemed too difficult for a human to fly into a completely normal exercise and completely extinguished any mortality rates associated with flying the new plane.

i am reading through the story now and i like how the author starting this writing with an intense, detailed description of saving this little girls life to stress the point of how much is required of doctors.

I found it interesting because it goes into how far medicine has come along. Its amazing that they can revive someone who could be considered dead after 2 hours. It’s also pretty amazing to find out a century ago you only needed to graduate high school and train for a year to become a doctor. The checklist that medical professionals use is also relatively knew and I thought that would be something that would have been around for a lot longer than it has.

Checklists are useful in many industries, and in many situations. House movers, wedding planners, and tax accountants already use them. In the case of “The Checklist,” doctors in ICUs could use it to remember mundane tasks like making sure to drape the patient’s entire body before running a line–and in doing so can save millions of dollars a year and reduce the death rate of ICU patients, the rate of infection, and the length of time patients spend in the ICU. Pilots can also use it to fly bomber planes… I didn’t know where he was going with the bomber plane story, but it was amazing to see how he managed to tie it in with the rest of the tale.

The first few pages of the article  was very intriguing about how modern medicine has evolved and how much better can it get. Half way through the article i wasn’t sure what to make of the it, to me it was just an educational reading that seamed directed more for people in the medical field especially with the jargon. Then i finally realized that the point the article was trying to make was that a checklist of simple steps was going to save more lives in the I.C.U. It’s basically an instruction manual. There was also a paragraph on airplane and how they were consider a very dangerous task until an instruction manual on  how to take off and land a plane was written.

What i got out of the article is how checklists have changed the mannerisms of intensive care units in certain areas mentioned in the article. With checklists nurses and doctors make sure that all the steps are taken care of in ICU procedures to reduce infections and other complications from occurring in patients. However as of the date of the article the implementation of checklists in ICU’s was not a standard meaning not all hospitals use checklists. This could lead to higher chances of infections and complications in patients then those who use checklists.

“TheChecklist” brought to my attention the complexities of surgery and and what goes on in the ICU. Not only that, but it discusses how complexities can be avoided by the implementation of a checklist which would cover necessary precautionary steps doctors should take during surgery. I normally hate reading things based on medical field because for one I  typically don’t understand the lingo, and two because it grosses me out. However, it was necessary to understand that there are ways to improve ihow doctors can save lives.