sábado, julho 10

We have to be more like engineers


Discurso de formatura na Faculdade de Medicina de Stanford. Excerto do que Atul Gawande disse à turma. link

Why does anyone receive suboptimal care? After all, society could not have given us people with more talent, more dedication, and more training than the people in medical science have—than you have. I think the answer is that we have not grappled with the fact that the complexity of science has changed medicine fundamentally. This can no longer be a profession of craftsmen individually brewing plans for whatever patient comes through the door. We have to be more like engineers building a mechanism whose parts actually fit together, whose workings are ever more finely tuned and tweaked for ever better performance in providing aid and comfort to human beings.
You come into medicine and science at a time of radical transition. You have met the older doctors and scientists who tell the pollsters that they wouldn’t choose their profession if they were given the choice all over again. But you are the generation that was wise enough to ignore them: for what you are hearing is the pain of people experiencing an utter transformation of their world. Doctors and scientists are now being asked to accept a new understanding of what great medicine requires. It is not just the focus of an individual artisan-specialist, however skilled and caring. And it is not just the discovery of a new drug or operation, however effective it may seem in an isolated trial. Great medicine requires the innovation of entire packages of care—with medicines and technologies and clinicians designed to fit together seamlessly, monitored carefully, adjusted perpetually, and shown to produce ever better service and results for people at the lowest possible cost for society.
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NY 16.06.10

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