Atul Gawande: preference

Transcript context

…You’ve written about yourself that you are highly indecisive by nature, and you will agonize over many choices. Is there any way in which you feel this—what you describe as your weakness—is actually your strength? Yes. I chose surgery, and I wrote in the passage you might be reflecting on that I chose surgery, in part, because I was drawn to the character of people who had that kind of decisiveness, took action when inaction was the worst thing, and then lived with the consequences. Took responsibility for whatever happened, learned from it, and then brought it to the next time. So I’ve brought to surgery my particular persona, which is to want to have more planning and more deliberation inserted into situations where there doesn’t seem to be time. And one of the really striking things is, we get this complaint, for example, that using a checklist in surgery, “Well that’s fine, but in emergencies, we don’t have time for that kind of thing.” And we demonstrated that in that situation, taking the one-and-a-half minutes for the very beginning part of it has enormous value. It’s, in fact, the group in whom we have the highest reduction in death are those in which the time is the most pressing. And so I think I’ve flipped my weakness into a strength where I can, but by battling with it to a certain degree. So are you a good healthcare patient?…

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