Book Being Reviewed:
Gawande, A. (2009). The checklist manifesto: How to get things right. New York: Metropolitan

Reviewer:
Thomas Murphy

Genre:
Non-Fiction - Adult

Subject Headings:
College

Review:
How does one battle the ever increasing complexity encountered in the mental health field? The answer may rest in Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto. Gawande (Being Mortal, Complications), a thoracic surgeon and longtime writer for The New Yorker, illuminates the power of the mundane checklist and demonstrates how complex tasks like surgery, architecture and flying airplanes are made safer and more efficient through their use. Clinical mental health counseling students and clinicians can benefit from learning how to apply checklists to the increasingly complex systems encountered in community agencies, hospitals and even private practice. How many of us has forgotten an important element in an Informed Consent or left out necessary information from a Behavioral Health Assessment? A checklist may be a simple, but powerful answer to that conundrum.

Gawande's great strength as a writer is his ability to dive into myriad disciplines and cogently describe elegant solutions to complex issues. His chapter on hospital infections details how the implementation of a checklist virtually eliminated one type of infection common to intensive care patients. Counseling interns and clinicians may find solutions to some of the difficulties they encounter as they develop professional skills.