Quotes by Atul Gawande

About Atul Gawande:

Atul Gawande is an American surgeon, author, and public health researcher. He is a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, professor in both the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In his work in public health, he is Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation and also chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit reducing deaths in surgery globally.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The vast majority of doctors really do try to take the money out of their minds. But to provide the best possible care requires using resources in a way that keeps you viable but improves the quality of care.

Atul Gawande

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 don't have the physical skills but because they don't have the moral skills - to practise and admit failure.

Atul Gawande

Health care confronts us with a difficult test. We have never corrected failure in something so deeply embedded in people's lives and in the economy without the pressure of an outright crisis.

Atul Gawande

Our health-care morass is like the problems of global warming and the national debt - the kind of vast policy failure that is far easier to get into than to get out of. Americans say that they want leaders who will take on these problems.

Atul Gawande

Doctors quickly learn that how much they make has little to do with how good they are. It largely depends on how they handle the business side of their practice.

Atul Gawande

I write because it's my way of finding cool ideas, thinking through hard problems and things I don't understand, and getting better at something.

Atul Gawande

Every country in the world is battling the rising cost of health care. No community anywhere has demonstrably lowered its health-care costs (not just slowed their rate of increase) by improving medical services. They've lowered costs only by cutting ...

Atul Gawande

Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coordination.

Atul Gawande

In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty.

Atul Gawande

The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front.

Atul Gawande

Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty. It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong.

Atul Gawande

Cost is the spectre haunting health reform. For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage.

Atul Gawande

The health-care sector certainly employs more people and more machines than it did. But there have been no great strides in service. In Western Europe, most primary-care practices now use electronic health records and offer after-hours care; in the U...

Atul Gawande

I believe that one version of the good in life can be defined by the moments I sometimes had playing tennis as a sixteen-year-old. You'd be out on the court and for an hour, two hours, sometimes an entire roasting hot day, and every single thing you ...

Atul Gawande

I have always believed that there is nothing greater than a life in rock n' roll - it has to be good rock n' roll - and I still think it is true.

Atul Gawande

The writing I love has something memorable in it - an image, a smell. It's the connection between the moment and the whole concept, weaving the micro together with the macro so that it has a hold on people - that's writing.

Atul Gawande

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

We now live in the era of the super-specialist - of clinicians who have taken the time to practice at one narrow thing until they can do it better than anyone who hasn't.

Atul Gawande

I'm floating between multiple media. I really wish you could buy the hardcover book and it would come with the digital download and audible version. I spend stupid amounts of money because I'm usually buying my books in at least two formats.

Atul Gawande

To become a doctor, you spend so much time in the tunnels of preparation - head down, trying not to screw up, trying to make it from one day to the next - that it is a shock to find yourself at the other end, with someone shaking your hand and asking...

Atul Gawande

Most people are squeamish about saying how much they earn, but in medicine the situation seems especially fraught. Doctors aren't supposed to be in it for the money, and the more concerned a doctor seems to be about making money the more suspicious p...

Atul Gawande

Author Bio

  • NameAtul Gawande
  • Descriptionmedical doctor and author
  • BornNovember 5, 1965
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPhysician; Medical Writer
  • WorksThe Checklist Manifesto
  • AwardsMacArthur Fellows Program