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Atul Gawande
Professor, Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health
Atul Gawande is a general surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and, since 1998, a staff writer for The New Yorker. In 2006, he received the MacArthur Award for his research and writing. His book "Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes On An Imperfect Science" was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002 and is published in more than a hundred countries. His newest book, "The Checklist Manifesto," is one of Amazon’s best books of the month: December 2009. He and his wife, Kathleen Hobson, live outside Boston and have three children: Walker, Hattie, and Hunter.
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3 min
Each year, 2,000,000 people obtain infections in American hospitals, 100,000 of which die. But as the surgeon and New Yorker staff writer’s work demonstrates, these infections are far from inevitable […]
9 min
You can tell a system is broken when a prominent children’s hospital devises a system that reduces local asthma cases by 87%, but then has to cancel the program due […]
7 min
The biggest challenge in our world is not lack of knowledge, but an inherent ineptitude at utilizing a vast and unprecedented web of data. From medicine to architecture to finance, […]
4 min
If you’re a hospital patient, advises surgeon Atul Gawande, make sure a family member is always with you.
4 min
The fear of massive settlement fees has forced doctors to take a number of generally excessive precautions—including unnecessary CT scans that may cause cancer down the road.
4 min
How does the dynamic change once a “friend” becomes a “patient”? Can small-talk exist with a person you’ve once cut open, or will they now awkwardly try to call you […]
4 min
St. Vincent’s Hospital, in New York City, loses $1,000,000 a day in caring for the homeless and uninsured. As the doctor and author explains, the question of treating such patients […]