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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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Atul Gawande
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: May 11
Journalist
Medical Writer
Professor
Researcher
Surgeon
Brooklyn
New York
Atul A Gawande
Atul Gawande
Every
Turn
Basic
Productivity
Brain
Field
Aviation
Quality
Tools
Gaps
High
Fields
Engineering
Checklists
Turns
Revolution
Brains
Simplistic
Help
Among
Construction
Lowly
Helping
Seem
Complexity
Combining
Seems
Risk
Fill
Virtually

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Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.
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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.
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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.
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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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The possibilities and probabilities are all we have to work with in medicine, though. What we are drawn to in this imperfect science, what we in fact covet in our way, is the alterable moment-the fragile but crystalline opportunity for one's know-how, ability, or just gut instinct to change the course of another's life for the better.
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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.
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We recruit for attitude and train for skill.
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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.
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Human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.
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What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?
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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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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.
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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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Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.
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Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.
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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.
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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.
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We have medicalized aging, and that experiment is failing us.
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Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.
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