Atul Gawande wrote an article for the New Yorker in 2007 about checklists for inserting central lines in hospital ORs which elaborates on some of the points in this FT piece:<p><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...</a><p>The central line checklist was extremely basic — almost condescendingly so — and some doctors resisted it as a waste of time.  Here's the checklist, from the article:<p><pre><code>  (1) Wash hands with soap
  (2) Clean the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic
  (3) Put sterile drapes over the entire patient
  (4) Wear a sterile mask, hat, gown, and gloves 
  (5) Put a sterile dressing over the catheter site once the line is in
</code></pre>
That's it.  Very, very basic.  And yet one ICU that implemented it saw central line infection rates drop by 66 percent, and that's representative of the drop in infection rates at other hospitals that started using it.