Atul Gawande
Atul Gawande
Atul Gawandeis an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In public health, he is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and also chairman of Lifebox,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth5 November 1965
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
You know, 97 percent of the time, if you come into a hospital, everything goes well. But three percent of the time, we have major complications.
I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.
And in stories, endings matter.
Outsiders tend to be the first to recognize the inadequacies of our social institutions. But, precisely because they are outsiders, they are usually in a poor position to fix them.
In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty.
No travel ban or quarantine will seal a country completely. Even if travel could be reduced by eighty per cent-itself a feat-models predict that new transmissions would be delayed only a few weeks. Worse, it would only drive an increase in the number of cases at the source. Health-care workers who have fallen ill would not be able to get out for treatment, and the international health personnel needed to quell the outbreak would no longer be able to go in.
When [disease] can't be stopped, that's where we become lost.
Culture matters. Of course, if physicians are rewarded or penalized for their service and results, the culture will change. But the key values we doctors are being pressed to embrace are humility, teamwork, and discipline.
You want to ensure people can do it right 99 percent of time. When we have to fire one of our surgical trainees, it is never because they dont have the physical skills but because they dont have the moral skills - to practise and admit failure.
We recruit for attitude and train for skill,
We Have Medicalized Aging, and That Experiment Is Failing Us
The evidence is that people who enter hospice don't have shorter lives. In many cases they are longer.
The possibilities and probabilities are all we have to work with in medicine, though. What we are drawn to in this imperfect science, what we in fact covet in our way, is the alterable moment-the fragile but crystalline opportunity for one's know-how, ability, or just gut instinct to change the course of another's life for the better.
This was not guilt: guilt is what you feel when you have done something wrong. What I felt was shame: I was what was wrong.