1st lecture: ‘Why do doctors fail?’
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Indian American surgeon and author Dr. Atul Gawande has been selected by the BBC to give the 2014 Reith Lectures, a series of four talks that will take place in four cities around the world.
Gawande is a practicing surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and is also a Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Harvard Medical School. His lecture series has been dubbed “The Future of Medicine,” and will take place in four separate installments that will see Gawande speak in Boston, London, Edinburgh, and New Delhi.
“Dr. Atul Gawande will examine the nature of progress and failure in medicine, a field defined by what he calls ‘the messy intersection of science and human fallibility,’ says the BBC, on its Reith Lectures website. “Known for both his clear analysis and vivid storytelling, he will explore the growing importance of systems in medicine and argue that the future role of the medical profession in our lives should be bigger than simply assuring health and survival.”
The first lecture will be entitled “Why Do Doctors Fail?” and will feature Gawande discussing the imperfect nature of the medical system, both in the US and worldwide, and how that will impact medical progress in the future. Gawande’s lecture will also tackle issues such as “ignorance [and] ineptitude” in the field of medicine, and how to solve these problems.
The second lecture is “The Century of the System,” and will “focus on the impact that the development of systems has had – and should have in the future – on medicine and overcoming failures of ineptitude.” These systems range from things as simple as a checklist, to complex mechanisms that keep hospitals and entire healthcare programs running.
The third lecture will be about “The Problem of Hubris,” and will get into the “great unfixable problems in life and healthcare – aging and death.” And finally, the fourth lecture – which is the one that will take place in New Delhi – will be called “The Idea of Wellbeing,” and will be about how the medical field must spend more time concentrating on wellbeing rather than “health and survival.”
Gawande was born and raised in the US, and is one of the most widely decorated and recognized surgeons in the world. He holds a B.S. degree from Stanford University, an M.A. from Balliol College at Oxford University, and M.D. from Harvard Medical School, and a Masters in Public Health (M.P.H.) from the Harvard School of Public Health.
The Reith Lectures, which are named after John Reith, were inaugurated by the BBC in 1948 with the goal of “[advancing] public understanding and debate about significant issues of contemporary interest.” Former lecturers include Betrand Russell, Robert Oppenheimer, and Dr. Jonathan Sacks.
The following video is a TED Talk given by Gawande in March of 2012, in which he addresses some of the topics that will be talked about during his Reith Lectures.