Quote

What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?

Atul Gawande

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Professionals
Regular
Wells
Well

More quotes by Atul Gawande

Image
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
Image
We recruit for attitude and train for skill.
Atul Gawande
Image
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
Image
No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency. Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not.
Atul Gawande
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.
Atul Gawande
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.
Atul Gawande
Image
Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.
Atul Gawande
Image
Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.
Atul Gawande
Image
We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way norms and standards change.
Atul Gawande
Image
This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.
Atul Gawande
Image
Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. But I would go further and say that making systems work - whether in healthcare, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty - is the great task of our generation as a whole.
Atul Gawande
Image
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
Image
Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.
Atul Gawande