Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
by Atul Gawande
Profile, Metropolitan, HK$192
Few professions demand perfection every minute of every day. Still fewer can measure the cost of failure to achieve it in lives lost. It's unrealistic to expect perfection in any occupation, yet when it comes to medicine that' what we insist on.
Medical writer Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, knows better than most that perfection is unattainable - but he believes 'better' is not. To that end, he offers Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, a collection of essays exploring how doctors in the US and around the world have made getting better at their craft an integral part of their practice of medicine.
The essays in Better are divided into three broad categories: 'Diligence', 'Doing right' and 'Ingenuity' - the three factors Gawande believes lead to better medicine. Diligence, he says, has to do with the art of paying attention to detail and how determination can make the most hopeless tasks possible. Something as simple as washing hands, which Gawande says doctors and nurses fail to do alarmingly often, could prevent outbreaks in hospitals that claim thousands of lives every year. Diligence also makes possible a campaign in India to inoculate millions of children in just a few days.