Marty Makary on Surgical Safety Checklists: recommends

In his 2012 book Unaccountable, surgeon Dr. Marty Makary championed standardized safety checklists in operating rooms to reduce surgical errors. The book, written during his career as a Johns Hopkins surgical oncologist (a background noted in his FDA swearing-in announcement), argued that checklists are a proven, low-cost intervention against the avoidable harm that the book documented across American hospitals.

Makary’s stated reasoning is that surgery is a team activity where simple verification steps — confirming the patient, the site, the equipment, and the plan — catch errors before they become injuries. He frames checklists as evidence that medicine’s failures are often failures of process rather than of skill.

This recommendation reflects his earliest public theme: that accountability and measurement, not secrecy, are what make healthcare safer.

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