None of what you said supports that checklist following is only for decreasing liability and not towards patient wellness. It may be the case but it doesn't really follow though.
It doesn't prove anything, but I consider it to be a strong anecdote supporting the argument that individual wellness is not the primary motivation for these checklists.
I can see an argument that it's about increasing average wellness across all people ever taken care of by that NICU, but from the perspective of an individual patient there's no difference between the two motivations—the point is that your own care is not the important thing to the hospital at that time, what's important is the rules and regulations.
In our case, we both felt that our care was actually actively hampered by NICU discharge rules that were designed for premature babies and were completely inappropriate for our late-term baby. The wheelchair was just the last hurrah of the situationally-inappropriate hospital regulations.
