Consider a Checklist?

Hello again. I hope that all is going well for you. As usual, things are going busily for me. Last week, I did lots and lots of teaching. It included teaching graduate students, medical students, and undergraduate students.

For one of the medical school courses, the director had assigned the students some reading from a book. Then small groups of students each met with a faculty member to discuss it.

The book was The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, by Dr. Atul Gawande. Dr. Gawande is a surgeon, writer, and public-health researcher. In the book, he argues for using checklists to help ensure that work is correct and complete.

Dr. Gawande supports his view with a study on using a surgical checklist in various developed and developing countries. In this study, using the checklist led consistently to much lower rates of complications, including fatal ones. Dr. Gawande writes that using checklists also can improve outcomes in other fields.

From an AuthorAID standpoint: A field where checklists can be helpful is the communication of research.

Some journals’ instructions to authors include checklists for authors submitting manuscripts. Also, searching the AuthorAID website using the term checklist leads to many resources containing checklists. And searching it using the term checklists leads to additional such resources.

Through these searches, one can find checklists for preparing good journal articles, grant proposals, poster presentations, and more. One can even find a checklist on mentoring.

Do you have checklists to suggest? If so, please post a comment.

Until the next post—

Barbara