How do we heal medicine? @ TED.com

Atul Gawande: How do we heal medicine? | Video on TED.com:


... An aviation checklist, like this one for a single-engine plane, isn't a recipe for how to fly a plane, it's a reminder of the key things that get forgotten or missed if they're not checked.
...
We implemented this checklist in eight hospitals around the world, deliberately in places from rural Tanzania to the University of Washington in Seattle. We found that after they adopted it the complication rates fell 35 percent. It fell in every hospital it went into. The death rates fell 47 percent
...
We're all specialists now, even the primary care physicians. Everyone just has a piece of the care. But holding onto that structure we built around the daring, independence, self-sufficiency of each of those people has become a disaster. We have trained, hired and rewarded people to be cowboys. But it's pit crews that we need, pit crews for patients.
...
Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. But I would go further and say that making systems work — whether in healthcare, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty — is the great task of our generation as a whole.”