Atul Gawande

Scientist

1965-11-05

Atul Gawande is an American surgeon, writer, and public health leader known for medical journalism and policy work.

Quotes by Atul Gawande

People seemed to have two different selves— an experiencing self who endures every moment equally and a remembering self who gives almost all the weight of judgment afterward to two single points in time, the worst moment and the last one. The remembering self seems to stick to the Peak-End rule even when the ending is an anomaly. Just a few minutes without pain at the end of their medical procedure dramatically reduced patients' overall pain ratings even after they'd experienced more than half an hour of high level of pain. "That wasn't so terrible," they'd reported afterward. A bad ending skewed the pain scores upward just as dramatically.
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Just ticking boxes is not the ultimate goal here. Embracing a culture of teamwork and discipline is. And if we recognised the opportunity, the two-minute WHO checklist is just a start.
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No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.
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Just ticking boxes is not the ultimate goal here. Embracing a culture of teamwork and discipline is. And if we recognised the opportunity, the two-minute WHO checklist is just a start.
Read quote
No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.
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People seemed to have two different selves— an experiencing self who endures every moment equally and a remembering self who gives almost all the weight of judgment afterward to two single points in time, the worst moment and the last one. The remembering self seems to stick to the Peak-End rule even when the ending is an anomaly. Just a few minutes without pain at the end of their medical procedure dramatically reduced patients' overall pain ratings even after they'd experienced more than half an hour of high level of pain. "That wasn't so terrible," they'd reported afterward. A bad ending skewed the pain scores upward just as dramatically.
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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.
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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 don't have the physical skills but because they don't have the moral skills - to practise and admit failure.
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When I do an operation, it's half a dozen people. When it goes beautifully, it's like a symphony, with everybody playing their part.
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I think we are faced in medicine with the reality that we have to be willing to talk about our failures and think hard about them, even despite the malpractice system. I mean, there are things that we can do to make that system better.
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I think the extreme complexity of medicine has become more than an individual clinician can handle. But not more than teams of clinicians can handle.
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There are, in human affairs, two kinds of problems: those which are amenable to a technical solution and those which are not. Universal health-care coverage belongs to the first category: you can pick one of several possible solutions, pass a bill, and (allowing for some tinkering around the edges) it will happen.
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The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front.
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Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.
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My vantage point on the world is the operating room where I see my patients.
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The damage that the human body can survive these days is as awesome as it is horrible: crushing, burning, bombing, a burst blood vessel in the brain, a ruptured colon, a massive heart attack, rampaging infection. These conditions had once been uniformly fatal.
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The writing I love has something memorable in it - an image, a smell. It's the connection between the moment and the whole concept, weaving the micro together with the macro so that it has a hold on people - that's writing.
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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.
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As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.
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