The power of checklists: “Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.”
[All they did was to create a checklist and empower the nurses to ensure that all doctors followed the checklist. Pronovost was smart about how he engaged them, see Mark’s post for more about that.]
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