302 Quotes by Atul Gawande

We've created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets - and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.

Don’t let yourself be. Find something new to try, something to change. Count how often it succeeds and how often it doesn’t. Write about it. Ask a patient or a colleague what they think about it. See if you can keep the conversation going.

I chose surgery because I thought that perhaps this would make me more like the kind of person I wanted to be.

People who reach certain levels of frailty, more important than getting their mammogram, more important than getting their blood pressure tweaked, they're at high risk of falling. If they fall and break their hip, they not only die sooner, they die miserably.

Good checklists, on the other hand are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything--a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps--the ones that even the highly skilled professional using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.

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.

What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?

Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.

Human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.