I love self help books of all sorts, but I tend to hate books trying to pass themselves off as Self Help books. The Checklist Manifesto sounds as if it is a self help book about making Checklists. The subtitle is How To Get Things Right. But really, it’s a book by a Surgeon about how to get Operation Rooms right, with a side trip on how to get Airplane Piloting Right, Pick Stocks Right, and Run a Restaurant Right. Most of the stories are about The Good Doctor trying to help the world to be a better place and he only ventures outside of medicine looking for ways to help with his quest for the perfect OR Checklist.
The Checklist Manifesto opens up with graphic descriptions of a number of surgeries. While I like House and Nurse Jackie, I don’t really like peering over a Doctor’s shoulder as he slices and dices someone on the operating table. These little vignettes of life in the OR were disturbing and sometimes painful to read. The idea here being that Doctors need to pay attention to what they are doing so they don’t kill people. Which Doctors seem to do a lot more often than I thought. Reading The Checklist Manifesto makes me pray that I never, ever need another surgery and makes me wonder how I survived the one I had.
But all of this minutia about Airliners, Operating Rooms, and Stock Picking might have been worth the effort if there had been a payoff in there somewhere. But there wasn’t. Good Doctor Gawande tells of the success of his Medical Checklist, but he never gives us more than a few hints on how we should go about making a Checklist of our own. There are bits of advice that he finds here and there, but they are never condensed into one finial chapter with a Checklist on How To Make a Checklist. We are left with old Doc Cawande patting himself on the back for being such a freaking genius, but little else.
Now I think it is great that he has whipped up his checklist and make hospitals the world over safer places to have an operation, but the title of his book was not How I Made Hospitals Safer, it was How To Get Things Right. It’s more like how he got one thing right-the rest of you are on your own.
Before you write off Dr. Gawande, consider reading “Better”, which I think he wrote prior to this book and is very interesting. Thanks for the head’s up on this book.
The book was very interesting and it is amazing that Dr Gawande is able to help save lives with a simple tool like a checklist. He does have an easy writing style and I will look for his other books.