Hospital Checklists Are Meant to Save Lives – So Why Do They Often Fail?

July 28, 2015

(Nature) – A cadre of researchers is working to make sense of the discrepancies. They are finding a variety of factors that can influence a checklist’s success or failure, ranging from the attitudes of staff to the ways that administrators introduce the tool. The research is part of the growing field of implementation science, which examines why some innovations that work wonderfully in experimental trials tend to fall flat in the real world. The results could help to improve the introduction of other evidence-based programmes, in medicine and beyond.