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Why the best doctors are so good, and how the rest can learn to improve.
Excerpts:
Gawande divides the essays into three sections — “Diligence,” “Doing Right” and “Ingenuity” — based on the components “for success in medicine or in any endeavor that involves risk and responsibility.”
Each essay focuses on a problem — the importance of hand-washing, health care delivery in India, the role of physicians in executions — that Gawande uses to anchor wide-ranging reflections.
...Gawande shows us that hand-washing turns out to be a profoundly complex and... that the moral obligations of physicians to death-row patients are not as clear as life and death, and that providing care to the poorest in the world takes a degree of ingenuity that should be categorized not simply as “better” but as downright heroic.
Via Deb Nystrom, REVELN
I highly recommend this well written collection of insightful performance stories.
Gawande demonstrates how focusing on patients, performance and the big picture, the system, leads to improvement for people and the profession. So much change fails, as he illustrates, without systemic intervention and peer-to-peer learning and engagement.
He uses history, story, numbers and his own experience to provide compelling insights useful to understanding systems thinking in performance.
His early examples and accounts of of controlling infection in hospitals provides an excellent view of how difficult it is to make changes in systems, and that it also is possible, and heroic to affect change with the right approach as well as dogged determination. ~ D
The book isn't new, but its insights into improving performance is compelling in using case examples for how challenging it is to help change take hold in complex, resistant to systems - even when the intent to change is strong. ~ D