The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

Atul Gawande is a surgeon specializing in the endocrine system and cancer. He is also a Harvard Medical School professor. Gawande uses his insider perspective as he examines some of the problems in the current health system, specifically avoidable complications from surgery. He published The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right in 2009, just after he had been requested by the World Health Organization (WHO) to help find ways to limit unsafe surgical practices all over the world. The WHO had noted a remarkable increase in surgeries and a large number of people suffering from surgical complications—many of which were avoidable. Limited by a lack of adequate resources, Gawande began looking for low-tech solutions and discovered the simple checklist as a potential solution. The Checklist Manifesto is Gawande’s third book, with Complications (2002) and Better (2007) preceding it. As the titles of his first two books suggest, Gawande’s work is focused on problem-solving in the medical field. While his first two works are more exploratory in nature, The Checklist Manifesto is argument-driven: His main purpose is to persuade, while his secondary purpose is to inform. Since The Checklist Manifesto, Gawande has written a fourth book called Being Mortal (2014).