Comment by click170 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by click170 | Hacker News Reader

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It's amazing how dangerous hospitals actually are, though it's also important to note that everyone working there is doing their best to keep your loved ones alive but at the end of the day, accidents will happen whenever and where ever they are allowed to.

I've had 2 relatives who were submitted to different local hospitals for different things, but they both contracted secondary infections, which nearly killed one of them.

At the end of the day, we should feel lucky that a complete stranger made an honest effort to help you or your loved one in their time of need, and not focus exclusively on the complications and accidents that may have happened along the way.

To anyone who works in healthcare, if you don't already, I would strongly encourage the use of checklists for any and every important task. Checklists save lives. [0]

[0] http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/7/08-010708/en/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7825780.stm

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/fall08checklist/

Edit: Typo.

Edit 2: These hospital visits were covered by Canadian healthcare so we didn't have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. I can see how it would be very difficult to overlook complications and accidents when the bill will likely bankrupt you.

For further reading on the subject, I recommend taking a look at The Checklist Manifesto (http://amzn.com/0312430000), written by Atul Gawande, one of the doctors mentioned in the articles.

For those skeptical of checklists as a symptom of bureaucracy, I wanted to suggest a distinction between top-down (or controlling) bureaucracy and bottom-up (or supportive) bureaucracy.

For the first 10 years or so of my working life, my only experience of paperwork was top-down controlling bullshit. Pointless timesheets. Useless reports. Data collected and never looked at again. It was managers imposing mandates in ways that rarely helped the business, and often hurt it.

But in getting into the Lean movement, I came to realize there's another approach. If you are a team that wants to do well, there's only so far you can go on implicit work practices. Eventually variation becomes the biggest barrier to improvement. The solution is to collaboratively create a standard way of getting a job done. With variation minimized, you can then start to rigorously test improvements, increasing quality and reducing waste.

This is easiest to see when you're working solo. A while back I was struggling to go running in the mornings. I was always forgetting something: keys, money, headphones. Now near the door is a simple list I can run down to make sure I have everything. Less stress, less wasted time in the mornings, more runs. I love it.

But groups can do the same thing. Can and should, really. Top-down imposition of quality practices rarely works. The people doing the work are the best ones to create and tune the way a job gets done. Might as well do it before some manager gets a bright idea and inflicts the wrong approach on you.

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