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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.

Atul Gawande

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Atul Gawande
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: May 11
Journalist
Medical Writer
Professor
Researcher
Surgeon
Brooklyn
New York
Atul A Gawande
Atul Gawande
Feel
Feels
Something
Guilt
Shame
Wrong
Felt
Done

More quotes by Atul Gawande

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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
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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 dont have the physical skills but because they dont have the moral skills - to practise and admit failure.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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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
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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
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Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.
Atul Gawande
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We recruit for attitude and train for skill.
Atul Gawande
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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
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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
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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
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We have medicalized aging, and that experiment is failing us.
Atul Gawande
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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
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I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.
Atul Gawande
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Checklists turn out...to be among the basic tools of the quality and productivity revolution in aviation, engineering, construction - in virtually every field combining high risk and complexity. Checklists seem lowly and simplistic, but they help fill in for the gaps in our brains and between our brains.
Atul Gawande
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Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.
Atul Gawande
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Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.
Atul Gawande
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What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?
Atul Gawande
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This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.
Atul Gawande
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Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.
Atul Gawande
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Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.
Atul Gawande