I've never worked in a hospital, but I have plenty of experience with massive bureaucracies. And that gives me guesses, perhaps fanciful, about things that coul

I've never worked in a hospital, but I have plenty of experience with massive bureaucracies. And that gives me guesses, perhaps fanciful, about things that could go awry with surgical checklists. Anyone with relevant experience, please weigh in if these seem feasible. 1. Every prominent error that occurs prompts administration to decree a new checklist item be added to provent it in the future. But these added items will not be root-cause fixes so will proliferate to the point that there are now several dozen of negative checks to prevent these one-in-a-million mistakes. And so the lists will grow and grow, but no one will ever dare to take an item off. Because then if that mistake ever does reoccur, the admin that authorized its removal is up for a hearing in front of the firing squad. 2. Some administrator somewhere, noticing redundancy within a given checklist will reinvent control structures. You'll have lists with loops and conditionals. And since the people creating these lists don't know what is "considered harmful" they will almost certainly add GOTO's. In fact, I'd be very surprised if GOTO's don't already exist in surgical checklists somewhere. But then this addition of control structures could increase to the point that a surgeon could, potentially, be put into an infinite loop! So committees will be formed to ensure every path through a checklist actually can be completed. And someone, somewhere in a hospital conference room, when asked to PROVE the lists all terminate, will take a breath, sit back, and rediscover the halting problem.