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Monday, April 25, 2011

Atul Gawande: a career built on an obsession with deadly failures - Profiles, People - The Independent

Atul Gawande: a career built on an obsession with deadly failures - Profiles, People - The Independent: "Surgeons are medicine's gladiators, courageous risk takers with big egos, untroubled by self-doubt. We like them that way. You wouldn't want a mouse slicing you open and stitching you up.

But not Atul Gawande. The celebrated American surgeon and writer, who now leads a global drive for the World Health Organisation that promises to save tens of thousands of lives, is made of different stuff. He is, he says, “obsessed with failure.” Instead of celebrating surgery’s 99.5 per cent success rate, we need to examine its 0.5 per cent failure rate. “It is in those margins that thousands of lives are lost,” he says."

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