stanleyt

Are you familiar with the work of Atul Gawande (a surgeon) and related work around checklists? [1] I would highly recommend you take a look at those and see if you still feel the same way about checklists. They are not about minimizing physicians' training & expertise. They're about procedural rigor, process standardization, and reducing inevitable human error. They're about shifting mental loads away from "rote" or "routine" tasks which are amenable to checklists and instead over to those complex thought processes that really need the specialized years of training.

I don't think people are trying to suggest doctors are maliciously saying "XYZ error rate is good enough, we don't need to do better", but more that there is some ego at play in the reactionary shunning of checklists, when in fact checklists can be a relatively easy way to produce better outcomes.

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/hospital-checklists-are-meant-to-...