The importance of checklists

The World Health Organization (WHO) makes available a one-page checklist for use by surgical teams. The WHO claims that this checklist has made "significant reduction in both morbidity and mortality" and is "now used by a majority of surgical providers around the world".  For example, the checklist is used by surgical teams in NHS England.

Checklists have application outside of surgery, too.  They are useful for new members of a team, as they provide guiderails.  They are equally useful for more experienced members of a team, who can easily become bored or jaded, and thus tend to skip duller steps to get to the more interesting work. Using checklists enforces a minimum quality standard at low cost.

The stakes are admittedly lower for actuarial studies than for surgery.  However, when setting a basis for liabilities running to hundreds of millions of pounds, dollars or euros, it is critically important to avoid mistakes.  For interest we provide our own checklist for mortality studies on the right.