Podcast: When Our Biases Play Tricks On Us, Checklists Help

ppThis episode of Hidden Brain looks at what makes specialists sometimes commit the most basic errors in their jobs. 

Surgeon Atul Gawande tells of an operation he performed a few years ago: he was removing a tumor from behind a patient's liver, "nestled tightly against an important blood vessel known as the vena cava". He was about to wrap things up when he nicked the blood vessel. The patient lost a huge amount of blood and went into cardiac arrest twice, but the doctors were finally able to stabilize him. 

But skill and brainpower were not the reason Mr Hagerman survived. Gawande says what actually saved his patient's life was a plan the surgical team had made before they began the surgery. This plan wasn't grand or complicated. In fact, it was a humble checklist.

"And what happened was...when we ran the checklist, when we got to the part where we said, 'What's the goal of the operation and tell me anything unexpected about this,' I mentioned to the anesthesiologist that this tumor was pretty tightly against the vena cava. The anesthesiologist then prepared to get more blood into the room, just in case."

What follows is a history of how the checklist came into being that takes us back to the Great Depression era, the developing of the Boeing airplane and a military flight demonstration gone wrong.