They fail because of severe checklist fatigue according to my wife (a surgeon). Checklists are great - so let's do them for everything, ALL the time. People start to tune them out because they do the same checklist hundreds and hundreds of times and they often have many irrelevant things on them. The people using the checklists have little ability to change them or to improve them and so they start to suffer from checklist fatigue. As they say in the article:
> “There's no point in having an item that says, 'Have the antibiotics been given?' if there are no antibiotics in the hospital,” says Dixon-Woods.
The checklists that my wife uses are apparently filled with these types of irrelevant checks.
Not to say that they aren't useful, they are, but as this article points out the implementation of checklists often leaves a lot to be desired.
> “There's no point in having an item that says, 'Have the antibiotics been given?' if there are no antibiotics in the hospital,” says Dixon-Woods.
The checklists that my wife uses are apparently filled with these types of irrelevant checks.
Not to say that they aren't useful, they are, but as this article points out the implementation of checklists often leaves a lot to be desired.