One of the changes to surgery was moving from a "did we remove the 5 swabs we put in" type of question to saying how many were removed and writing that down next to how many were put in.
A couple of years ago I changed how our work checked the tyre pressures on company vehicles. It used to be a sheet with the tyre pressure stated at the top then a checklist of if each tyre was OK. I changed it to the checker having to write down each individual pressure.
This had two positive effects. Firstly it helped ensure they actually took the measurement and secondly we could identify slow punctures better.
Someone linked this article in a thread related to worker safety or hazards.
There always seems to be ways to improve safety or reduce failure rate. But the problem is lack of incentive or motivation to make those improvements.
After reading the actual article. The point and call aims to eliminate the "slip" error. By keeping the human awareness focused and engaged in the activity.
I recently went around the USS Midway museum. It struck me that the guy in charge of the catapult would point at each person in turn waiting for an OK, before making a very clear signal to launch. Not quite point and call, mainly because the deck would be too noisy for the call bit, but it worked.
There's a great book by Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto, that talks about this transfer of best practices from aviation to surgery (including checklists and CRM). Informative and entertaining read.
I think it's extremely important, because the case of aviation shows that highly trained professionals make mistakes all the time. Now, bad mistakes in aviation are very visible (hard to ignore a crashed passenger jet). However, bad mistakes in surgery result may result in the death of one person that was sick already. So, it's very easy to "overlook" them.
I feel much more comfortable in a hospital that uses checklists and CRM.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8862273