Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.
Atul Gawande
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Atul Gawande
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: May 11
Journalist
Medical Writer
Professor
Researcher
Surgeon
Brooklyn
New York
Atul A Gawande
Atul Gawande
Villains
Villain
Doctors
Mistakes
Mistake
Make
More quotes by Atul Gawande
When we, doctors, ask patients what their priorities are if time is short, what we do is we use what is available to us - whether it's geriatric care or palliative care or hospice care - to make sure they're living the kind of life that they want to live.
Atul Gawande
You can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected.
Atul Gawande
Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.
Atul Gawande
We recruit for attitude and train for skill.
Atul Gawande
This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.
Atul Gawande
We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way norms and standards change.
Atul Gawande
If I became just a brain in a jar - as long as I can communicate back and forth with people, that would be okay with me.
Atul Gawande
Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.
Atul Gawande
I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.
Atul Gawande
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.
Atul Gawande
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.
Atul Gawande
What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?
Atul Gawande
A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it-will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?-because the difference between triumph and defeat, you'll find, isn't about willingness to take risks. It's about mastery of rescue.
Atul Gawande
Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.
Atul Gawande
Having great components is not enough, and yet we've been obsessed in medicine with components. We want the best drugs, the best technologies, the best specialists, but we don't think too much about how it all comes together.
Atul Gawande
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.
Atul Gawande
People who reach certain levels of frailty, more important than getting their mammogram, more important than getting their blood pressure tweaked, they're at high risk of falling. If they fall and break their hip, they not only die sooner, they die miserably.
Atul Gawande
We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right - one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in.
Atul Gawande
One of the consequences of if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, is that all of us now are at risk of being a preexisting - of having a preexisting condition waiting to happen. Life, increasingly, is a preexisting condition waiting to happen, now that we have more and more of this data available.
Atul Gawande
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.
Atul Gawande