More on Checklists via the news junkie at Maggie's Farm
The brain is a careless beast. Mostly, I blame my carelessness on the limited capacity of working memory - it can hold seven discrete items, plus or minus two - which means that we're constantly forcing ideas to exit the stage of awareness.
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To be honest, it's a little terrifying that a simple checklist could have such dramatic consequences. But the point is that surgeons are constantly shifting their attention from one task to the next, which means that the item that just occupied their mental scratchpad (like that sponge, or the administration of anesthesia) is now gone. That's why a checklist can be so helpful: it forces the doctors to think, if only for a moment, about what they've just forgotten.
One commenter said
When I was Navy nuke on a submarine, we had to do EVERYTHING by the book (aka checklist) no matter how mundane or routine the task. The reason surgeons may be chafing at using a "simple checklist" is simple: ego. Yes, turnaround in a hospital is important, but it pales in comparison to surgeon's "smarter than thou" culture which breeds doctors who know and do everything with their memory and memory alone. While US medicine has a not-too-stellar record for accidents and gaffes, the US Navy (surprisingly) has never had an accident worth noting (sometimes, with 18 year old recent high school grads!). These "checklists" should have been embraced DECADES ago.