Saving 28,000 Lives a Year

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. "A decade ago, Israeli scientists published a study in which engineers observed patient care in ICUs for twenty-four-hour stretches. They found that the average patient required a hundred and seventy-eight individual actions per day, ranging from administering a drug to suctioning the lungs, and every one of them posed risks. Remarkably, the nurses and doctors were observed to make an error in just one per cent of these actions — but that still amounted to an average of two errors a day with every patient. Intensive care succeeds only when we hold the odds of doing harm low enough for the odds of doing good to prevail. This is hard." 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.

Comments

Re:Look at Airplanes

[evanbd]

In my experience with rocket engine tests, both professionally and as a hobby, I've seen checklists be invaluable tools. I've seen them catch problems that were irrelevant, ones that would have resulted in loss of data, ones that would have resulted in incorrect operation, and ones that had direct safety impacts. However, the problem you describe is very, very common. The simplest solution is quite effective, and they discuss it in the article (but fail to mention how amazingly important it is). You need the person who is responsible for reading the list and making sure each item happens to *not* be the one doing it.

In the article, the nurses follow the checklist and stop the doctors if a step gets missed. At an XCOR Aerospace rocket test, at any given time there is someone whose sole responsibility is reading the checklist (who that is may change through the day, but there always is such a person, and who it is is always clearly defined). In both cases, the person with the checklist has the authority to stop whatever is happening and correct the situation. When I test my hobby rocket motors, the test crew is much more limited (usually two or three people, compared to at least six and often many more at XCOR). As a result, the person reading the checklist is usually also doing things on it. Mistakes are more common, and it's not uncommon to set down the checklist and just do things for a while.

That separation of roles is simple, yet highly effective. Obviously it's a bit hard in a single-pilot airplane. But, in a situation where it's at all possible, it's well worth doing. There are a number of reasons it helps, but one of the simplest is important: the reader can hold the checklist binder with their thumb pointing at the last step completed, since they don't have to use that hand to actually do anything. In the medical case, you're actually making checks on a piece of paper that goes into the file, but the idea is the same.

As an aside, having the checklist be unfamiliar is a bad thing -- mistakes and confusion are much more common after a checklist change. The fix lies in how you use the checklist, not what it says. The reaction to hearing the next step on the list read needs to be "yep, I've already got the tools in my hand" or "oh, right, nearly forgot that" -- not "wait, what was that? Oh, right I was already doing that." If you do that, people will be more inclined to ignore the checklists, because they interfere with operations.

Re:Importantly

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention the fact that all it takes is a single misstep to fuck you up. Believe me I know. When I was a kid we went from rolling in dough to 3 years on welfare nearly starving. Why? Because my dad who was making damn good money at the time as a special job truck driver(because he could make a semi dance and get it into places that people would swear a truck wouldn't fit) and went to help a fellow driver who had got his load hung up. After he got it loose he went up top to check on the damage and a piece of the top crumpled under him and launched him head first off the roof onto concrete. The medical bills for putting his skull back together, plus the ICU bills quickly blew through the insurance and savings and due to the damage he was not able to work for nearly 3 years.

That is why every chance I get I try to help out those that don't have as much as me, and spend a decent chunk of my free time talking SMBs out of and raiding junk shops for PCs that I then rebuild and give to those that don't have one. Knowing that I can use my time and knowledge to make life a little better for a single mom, a kid needing a decent machine to do his homework on, or a small church that uses their donations to help the poor not only gives me a good feeling but makes their lives a little easier and at the same time saves a working PC from becoming just another pile of e-waste in a landfill. For example I helped set up a little network of donated PCs for a battered womens shelter that uses them to teach office skills.

So in this Xmas season don't think the only way you have to help is by throwing cash in a charities coffers, there are many ways that someone who knows IT can make someone's life a little easier. Believe me there are plenty of groups out there doing good work whose computers and/or networks are about to fall apart. A little of your time and some donated gear can make a big difference.