Unfortunately, there's a lot of resistance to using checklists, from the nurses to doctors. I wish they'd just swallow their pride and worry more about how to improve than how it makes them look when their mistakes become visible and explicit to the people around them.
This is something of a case of "Physician - heal thyself".
I've advocated the use of checklists in software for decades. I wrote something 5 years ago and posted it here[0][1]. The discussion was enlightening. Read the discussions, keeping in mind the comments here about the resistance encountered by people in the field.
Many of the points in the discussions are useful and can be used to create and adapt checklists, but no, they are being used to dismiss them out of hand.
Only one company I worked with to date really used checklists and I firmly believe it was one of the reasons they were able to maintain 150k LOC of legacy JavaScript in a single project.
I wonder how much of this is due to the self-selection of the profession in terms of personalities. Surgery in particular is known to attract Type-A personalities. I witnessed similar attitudes in healthcare and other high-status positions where hubris makes them think they know better...until they have an accident. And even then, there's a strong urge to rationalize the outcome as unavoidable
It's not just about lawsuits. I've seen cases (hospitals) where checklists drew pushback from doctors because they didn't like being questioned by nurses who noticed them making mistakes. It impinged on their egos. Implementing checklists requires a certain amount of humility that just isn't there in many cases.
