When I was in the final year, our professor told us how a surgeon had amputated the wrong limb of a patient. He didn't care to cross-check where the pathology was and operated the patient in a hurry and as a result, faced negligence charges. He was also barred from the OT.

He told us this because he wanted to teach us the significance of WHO's surgical safety checklist.

The checklist has three parts. Sign in which is before the induction of anesthesia, time-out which is before an incision is made and finally Sign Out.

As the surgeries are getting complex day by day, performing so many steps in the correct order with maximum precision is extremely challenging. Another challenge is to reduce post-op morbidity and mortality as well.

With the adaptation of this Simple checklist, doctors were able to reduce the post-op complications drastically.

The pioneer of this Checklist was Dr. Atul Gawande who is a breast surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. I admire him a lot and in his book The Checklist Manifesto, he has written about the whole process of how this checklist was created, what were his inspirations, what all problems he faced and how can we adapt these simple checklists to organize our cluttered lives.