The compulsion to do better touches us all as do the road blocks that impede our betterment: fatigue, inadequate resources and our imperfections. Yet, there is perhaps no other field in which improvement is more important than medicine, where the difference between saving or losing a life is in the smallest of details. Dr. Atul Gawande is a MacArthur Fellow and a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, as well as an associate professor of Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health.
Dr. Gawande’s new book is Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, and he joins Coy Barefoot on WINA’s Charlottesville–Right Now! to talk about ways to improve the health care system.