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 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,
What is needed, however, isn't just that people working together be nice to each other. It is discipline. Discipline is hard--harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can't even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.
I said there are at least two kinds of satisfaction, however, and the other has nothing to do with skill. It comes from human connection. It comes from making others happy, understanding them, loving them.
Developing a skill is painful, though. It is difficult. And that's part of the satisfaction. You will only find meaning in what you struggle with. What you struggle to get good at next may not seem the exact right thing for you at first. With time and effort, however, you will discover new possibilities in yourself-an ability to solve problems, for instance, or to communicate, or to create beauty...
The vast majority of doctors really do try to take the money out of their minds. But to provide the best possible care requires using resources in a way that keeps you viable but improves the quality of care.
The health-care sector certainly employs more people and more machines than it did. But there have been no great strides in service. In Western Europe, most primary-care practices now use electronic health records and offer after-hours care; in the United States, most don't.
People say that the most expensive piece of medical equipment is the doctor's pen. It's not that we make all the money. It's that we order all the money.
Health care confronts us with a difficult test. We have never corrected failure in something so deeply embedded in people's lives and in the economy without the pressure of an outright crisis.
Doctors quickly learn that how much they make has little to do with how good they are. It largely depends on how they handle the business side of their practice.
Our health-care morass is like the problems of global warming and the national debt - the kind of vast policy failure that is far easier to get into than to get out of. Americans say that they want leaders who will take on these problems.
My vantage point on the world is the operating room where I see my patients.
I was never born to write. I was taught to write. And I am still being taught to write.
George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.