Quote

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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Atul Gawande
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: May 11
Journalist
Medical Writer
Professor
Researcher
Surgeon
Brooklyn
New York
Atul A Gawande
Atul Gawande
Right
Risk
Willingness
Things
Ready
Admit
Differences
Triumph
Wrong
Defeat
Often
However
Doe
Failure
Rescue
Find
Difference
Mastery
Take
Steps
Risks

More quotes by 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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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.
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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.
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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
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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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One of the consequences of if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, is that all of us now are at risk of being a preexisting - of having a preexisting condition waiting to happen.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.
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Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.
Atul Gawande
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We have medicalized aging, and that experiment is failing us.
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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
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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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What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?
Atul Gawande
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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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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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Human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.
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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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.
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Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.
Atul Gawande