Surgeon, Writer Atul Gawande to Discuss How Checklists Can Transform Health Care
Atul Gawande
Renowned surgeon, writer and health policy expert Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, will visit UCSF on Wednesday, Jan. 13, to discuss his brand new book, “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.”
The talk will be held from 8 to 9 a.m. at Cole Hall on the Parnassus campus, and will be followed by a book signing. The event is being presented by the UCSF Department of Medicine as Medical Grand Rounds, but it is open to all faculty, staff and students.
Gawande, an endocrine surgeon, serves on the staff of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and The New Yorker magazine. He is also an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health, and research director for the Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Center for Surgery and Public Health.
He directs the World Health Organization’s Safe Surgery Saves Lives program, which focuses on reducing deaths, complications and disparities in surgery around the world.
Gawande has written two previous bestselling books, as well as many influential articles for The New Yorker. In 2006, he received a prestigious MacArthur Foundation award, also known as a “genius grant.”
Gawande’s latest book, “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right,” explores how the deceptively simple checklist can be used to master extraordinary levels of complexity in the world.
In the book, Gawande cites evidence from a wide variety of disciplines, as well as his own research. For example, after implementing a 19-item surgical safety checklist at eight hospitals around the world in 2008, Gawande and colleagues at the Safe Surgery Saves Lives Program found that postoperative complication rates fell by an average of 36 percent, along with a similar reduction in deaths.
Photo by Fred Field
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