Textbook of Usability

b. 1965, USA · Surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital; professor at Harvard

Also known as: Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande is a general and endocrine surgeon, public-health researcher and New Yorker writer whose book The Checklist Manifesto (2009) made the case for surgical safety checklists in operating theatres worldwide. His team at the World Health Organization developed the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist, a one-page form covering sign-in, time-out and sign-out steps; trials across eight hospitals showed major reductions in postoperative mortality and complications when the checklist was adopted.

The book's argument (that the complexity of modern technical work exceeds the unaided memory of even the most experienced practitioners, and that simple structured prompts catch the failures that experts know they should not be making) generalises the aviation cockpit checklist tradition into medicine, software operations, finance and any domain where consequential routine work is performed under time pressure. Gawande's earlier books Complications (2002), Better (2007) and Being Mortal (2014) are likewise required reading on healthcare quality.