1. RST & Associates: Organizational Effectiveness Consulting Page 1
How Important is Organization Development? It Can Even Save Lives! June, 2015
How Important is Organization Development?
It Can Even Save Lives!
Robert S. Travis
Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland
In late March of 2010, I was watching the usual Sunday morning talk shows when 11 TV
Hill, the local public affairs program on Baltimore’s WBAL-TV, came on. Before the
opening credits, they teased the interviews they were doing that day, one of which was
with Peter J. Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D. of Johns Hopkins Medicine, who was going to talk
about his work to reduce the incidence of infection in hospitals.
This particular show aired about a month after my father passed away and about a year
after we lost my mother. Although they each had their own separate underlying health
issues, a contributory cause of death for both of them was sepsis, a serious blood
infection. So, needless to say, the possibility of reducing the occurrence of infection was
a topic that grabbed my attention.
Dr. Pronovost’s work in this regard dealt specifically with the use of intravenous catheters.
He developed a five-step checklist for these procedures, which includes such seemingly
simple things as the doctor washing his or her hands and cleaning the patient’s skin. He
implemented the checklist in studies at Hopkins and in hospitals throughout Michigan,
where the rate of infection was virtually eliminated. The checklist is now being
implemented across the United States and in other countries such as the United Kingdom,
Spain, and Peru.

2. RST & Associates: Organizational Effectiveness Consulting Page 2
How Important is Organization Development? It Can Even Save Lives! June, 2015
What’s relevant to organization development (OD) is Dr. Pronovost’s contention that it’s
not his checklist that’s important so much as changing the culture inside hospitals. The
checklist is simply a tool to encourage communication and strengthen working
relationships within the medical team. As he writes in an editorial for the Huffington Post,
“Checklists can work, but it's not enough to merely hand doctors a piece of paper, we
must respect and acknowledge each member of the care team and measure results.” The
most junior nurse should be empowered to stop the procedure if he/she sees even the
most senior doctor forget something like hand washing. Doctors, who are busy juggling
the cases of several patients, should give themselves permission to be human and allow
that they’ll occasionally forget something. Rather than seeing a nurse’s reminder as a
challenge to their authority, doctors should be grateful that the rest of the team is there to
back them up, and to point out an error while there is still time to correct it, before it causes
harm to the patient.
It’s this kind of communication between members of work teams that lies at the heart of
organization development.
Also interesting from an OD perspective is that, although Dr. Pronovost would like to see
every hospital use his checklist, he doesn't want it mandated by legislation. He believes
such a requirement would stifle innovation. If his specific checklist were mandated, that
might inhibit another practitioner in another hospital from innovating and discovering items
that should be added to the checklist or replace items already on it, or from finding another
way to better engage all members of the medical team, which is really the objective. This
inhibition could prevent his checklist, which is good, from giving way to something better
that might save even more lives.
Given the specifics of my parents’ illnesses, it’s uncertain that Dr. Pronovost’s innovations
would have saved them. But it is heartening to note that his work has saved others from
the same kind of demise and spared other families from watching loved ones die this kind
of death.
By devising and implementing his checklist, and by using it to enhance communication in
hospitals, Dr. Pronovost is creatively improving operations within the very complex
medical field, and yielding much better outcomes. Applying such OD principles as he has
can have immensely positive results in any organization, across all fields of endeavor. It
is gratifying to see the impact these principles can have, even to the point of saving
people’s lives.
For more information on Dr. Pronovost's work, I recommend the book he wrote with Eric
Vohr, Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals: How One Doctor's Checklist Can Help Us Change
Health Care from the Inside Out, available at Amazon.