An excellent book about how to get better at anything

books:

	• Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance Atul Gawande Picador, 2008 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 82 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Wonderful

About: A doctor discusses performance in medicine

Pros: Engaging, well written, eye-opening, Just as good as his first book Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

Cons: None that come to mind

Grade: A

A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

The surgeon I got the book for as a gift reported that he found it very relevant.
and well written.

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An excellent book about how to get better at anything

This book will be a great read for you if you're interested in the practice of medicine and how it could be done better. You'll love it if you simply enjoy lucid writing about the practice of medicine.

But this book also offers you great lessons if you want to understand how science and performance management come together as they should in business or any other field of endeavor. That's because the author sets out to answer a question that is as important for people in business as it is for people in medicine.

What does it take to be good at something when it is so easy not to be?

Gawande ways that most people, especially physicians, think that success in medicine comes from canny diagnosis, technical prowess and the ability to empathize. They think that progress in medicine comes from scientific breakthroughs and sophisticated equipment and procedures.

The reality, though, is quote different. Improved performance, according to Gawande, comes from

Diligence
Doing Right
Ingenuity

Again and again Gawande demonstrates how concentrating on patients and on performance leads to improvement for both individuals and for medical practice in general. He does this with a mix of historical examples, patient stories, statistics and stories from his own life and practice.

He divides the book into three sections corresponding to his three necessities for improvement.

In the section on Diligence the chapters are on washing hands, dealing with polio in India, and dealing with casualties from the Iraq war. The chapter on military medicine and the concentration on process improvement is worth the price of the book if you're in business. One of the most powerful lessons of this book is that process improvements can lead to dramatic improvements in performance.

The section on Doing Right deals with ethical issues that physicians face. The chapters are on medical malpractice, whether and how physicians should be involved in executions, when a physician should fight to keep a patient alive, and the problems and dilemmas of how the business side of medicine affects how medicine is practiced.

The central messages of this section are that "Choices must be made. No choice will always be right. There are ways to make our choices better." How to learn about making better choices is the subject of the third and final section of the book.

In Ingenuity or "thinking anew," Gawande covers measuring the comparative effectiveness of physicians and medical centers, relative and absolute measures of performance, the practice of obstetrics as a model of change, and how physicians in less developed countries get by without the technology and facilities that are characteristic of US medicine.

This section is about how to do better. You can sum it up this way: there is a bell curve in almost all human activities with huge variations in performance between the best and those in the middle of the pack. Measuring results is the way to get results that matter.

This book is about the practice of medicine but it's also about getting better at whatever it is that you do. Gawande's message is that "better is possible." It requires diligence and moral clarity, the willingness to try and measure outcomes, and the discipline to change what you do based on the results you get.

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Important information

I am a physician who feels passionately about the issues of quality and pain management, etc, and this touches on many of them in really interesting ways. I didn't find it quite as good a read as his other book, Complications, but I particularly appreciated the final chapter on pushing the envelope on disease management excellence. A great read for health care professionals and health care consumers!

Better ... than most doctor books

Surgeon Atul Gawande offers a reflective se of essays on today's practice of medicine. Anyone who is or who will become a patient - that basically includes everyone - should consider this thoughtful book. Gawande wields reverently the sanctioned power to open up peoples' bodies. One undercurrent in his book is the role that insurance reimbursement has on patient care (negative).

Another undercurrent is the discipline of improvement as applied to medical practice. Practicing medicine is part science, part art. As in any endeavor, some practitioners are better than others and that which gets measured gets improved. Thus, Gawande suggests that measuring systems for quality, however imperfect, be nonetheless devised and applied.

For an engaging peek behind the white lab coat, read BETTER by Atul Gawande!

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, page 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

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