Checklist Manifesto

Medical workers go into so many hospital rooms that it is easy to get sloppy about washing their hands when they go in each and every room. The book, Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals: How One Doctor's Checklist Can Help Us Change Health Care from the Inside Out, discusses getting medical professionals to wash their hands consistently. 

"It’s been known in medicine for more than a century that this simple procedure can reduce infections and save lives. Yet doctors do not wash their hands consistently when visiting a patient and there is no standardized procedure in place to ensure they do. They know they are supposed to, but on average they do it 30 percent of the time. Perhaps more alarming, most hospitals do not monitor rates of hand washing and there’s no accountability for this performance. And while people don’t usually die from bad coffee, many patients have likely died from bacteria on a physician’s hands.


Why isn’t hand washing standardized in hospitals – along with thousands of other procedures that are known to save lives? It would be easy to blame doctors, but the bulk of the problem does not lie there. Most physicians care deeply about their work and want nothing but the safest care for their patients. It’s the culture of medicine and the systems within which doctors practice that are at fault. Physicians, including myself, are trained to believe that we don’t need standardization because we don’t make mistakes; we are told that our brains have endless storage capacity and that we have perfect recall of all the thousands of hours of information we’ve learned from medical school and years of practice. Yet we do not. The fact is, just like all other humans, we forget."

If you need to have people in your home, having every person who enters immediately wash his/her hands should make an impressive difference in your safety. Soap is significantly more effective than hand sanitizer because it pulls the virus apart by pulling the protective lipid off of them.  

Use hydrogen peroxide wipes to disinfect everything, especially metal and plastic surfaces Bleach is effective but hard on the lungs. Alcohol is effective but takes 4 minutes (which is why sanitizer is not as effective as soap). Hydrogen peroxide kills the virus within 30 seconds. 

But it may be that the world changes in a couple of weeks in such a way that no one can come over. 

Since it is too late to contain the virus, the goal now is to slow the rate of transmission. If we don't, the medical system will be overwhelmed and no one qualified will be available. There won't be enough medical resources for everyone who gets the virus and needs medical care, and there won't be medical resources for people with other issues. 

If you have people in your home, have them immediately wash their hands, sudsing them for 20 seconds to pull the lipids off the virus and to give them time to get all parts of their hands, between their fingers, and under their nails.