Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the values that doctors must adopt alongside the use of checklists.
Atul Gawande's quote highlights the importance of checklists in the medical field and suggests that their effective implementation requires healthcare professionals to embody values such as humility, discipline, and teamwork. This shift in values is crucial for improving patient care and ensuring that all necessary steps are taken during medical procedures.
In practice
In a medical conference discussing quality care improvements, this quote can be used to highlight the importance of adopting teamwork in hospital protocols.
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.
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.
When I do an operation, it's half a dozen people. When it goes beautifully, it's like a symphony, with everybody playing their part.
At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't.
We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.
No travel ban or quarantine will seal a country completely. Even if travel could be reduced by eighty per cent-itself a feat-models predict that new transmissions would be delayed only a few weeks. Worse, it would only drive an increase in the number of cases at the source. Health-care workers who have fallen ill would not be able to get out for treatment, and the international health personnel needed to quell the outbreak would no longer be able to go in.
Everything you do in a patient's room, after he is 'put up' for the night, increases tenfold the risk of his having a bad night. But, if you rouse him up after he has fallen asleep, you do not risk - you secure him a bad night.
Health is not an objective condition which can be understood by the methods of natural science alone. It is rather a condition related to the mental attitude by which the individual has to value what is essential for his life.
It is totally unacceptable that there are countries with no paediatric cardiac surgeries.
Some patients, though conscious that their condition is perilous, recover their health simply through their contentment with the goodness of the physician.
And I have always told the patients when I talk to them. When they come around and say, "What will you have to drink? Oh that's right you don't drink." Just speak up and say, 'Of course I drink. But I just don't drink alcohol.'
It's hard to raise awareness of pancreatic cancer - people who get it don't live long enough.
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