Thoughtful, inspiring speaker on medicine, healthcare and healthcare reform. Deep insight into the issues of ethics and performance that all professionals face.
Highlights

As a practicing surgeon and an accomplished writer, teacher and speaker, Dr. Atul Gawande offers audiences a unique perspective on the practice of medicine, the reform of healthcare, and the human struggle to do better, to improve performance.

He received the MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the "genius prize," in 2006, for the "fresh and unique perspective, clarity, and intuition" in his written work and his "energetic and imaginative" approach to finding practical ways to improve surgical practice.

Dr. Gawande is one of the most influential voices on healthcare reform in America today. With the sensible and pragmatic approach of a surgeon, he encourages incremental reforms that build on the strengths and limitations of our current system and has organized a conference for policy makers to explain how communities are lowering costs and raising quality.

Atul is the author of three brilliant bestselling books on medicine, culture and human experience. In his book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Dr. Gawande uses the high stakes challenges he faces as a surgeon to explore the universal struggle to perform well—what it takes to excel in any area of human endeavor.

His first book, Complications, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002 and is published in more than a hundred countries.

Atul's current book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right is a New York Times bestseller. In this book, Dr. Gawande explores the importance of using the lowly checklist and how it has revolutionized medical practice and saved lives.

Dr. Gawande holds distinguished positions in all of his professional roles. He is the Research Director for the BWH Center for Surgery and Public Health, a practicing surgeon and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine.

He leads the World Health Organization's global campaign to reduce avoidable deaths and complications in surgery and to reduce deaths at child delivery.

Atul has a wonderful gift for telling true tales that bring to life the issues at stake in the ancient human endeavor of healing.

Topics

Health Care Reform—Getting There From Here
Better—Lowering Costs and Improving Health Care

Atul Leads WHO Initiative

Dr. Gawande leads the World Health Organization's global campaign to reduce avoidable deaths and complications in surgery. Click here to read the press release.

The MacArthur Fellowship

He received the MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the "genius prize," in 2006, for the "fresh and unique perspective, clarity, and intuition" in his written work and his "energetic and imaginative" approach to finding practical ways to improve surgical practice.

Issues in Medicine and Healthcare

Dr. Gawande is a unique and important voice on the increasingly newsworthy and complex subject of healthcare. Audiences of all kinds are thrilled by his insider’s portrayal of the detective work involved in diagnosis and treatment. Anyone who’s been a patient finds his candid accounts of patient care enlightening. Medical audiences love his eloquent way of reflecting their conflicts and concerns; non-medical audiences appreciate his deep insight into the issues of ethics and performance that all professionals face.

Direct and profound, his talks speak to the most pressing issues in medicine and healthcare today with a voice that is both candid and compelling. As with his writing, his stories and ideas capture the hows and the whys, the conflicts and the mysteries of modern medical practice.

The Books

Atul Gawande is "arguably the best nonfiction doctor-writer around" (Salon.com). He builds his books and articles around stories from his surgical practice that reveal truths about, not just how we practice medicine but also about the human condition in general. Then he clarifies these truths, with fine prose and a talent for storytelling, and with a gift for opening insights into human experience.

The struggle to perform well is universal: each one of us faces fatigue, limited resources, and imperfect abilities in whatever we do. But nowhere is this drive to do better more important than in medicine, where lives are on the line with every decision. In his book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Atul Gawande explores how doctors strive to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of obstacles that sometimes seem insurmountable.

In his previous book Complications, Dr. Gawande offered a raw view from the scalpel’s edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. Full of dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, Complications is nuanced and lucid, unafraid to confront the conflicts and uncertainties that lie at the heart of modern medicine, yet always alive to the possibilities of wisdom in humanity’s heroic attempts at healing.

Credentials

• MacArthur Fellowship, 2006.
• Staff member, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
• 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 BWH Center for Surgery and Public Health.
• Staff writer on medicine and science for The New Yorker magazine.
• Director of the World Health Organization's Global Challenge for Safer Surgical Care.
• Former columnist, The New England Journal of Medicine.
• Senior health policy advisor in the Clinton presidential campaign and in the White House.
• Numerous selections for various annual anthologies of best American nonfiction.
• Complications named best nonfiction book of 2002 by Amazon.com, a New York Times Notable Book, and numerous other awards.
• Published in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000, The New Yorker essay collection In Sickness and in Health, and Slate.
• National Book Award finalist.
• Rhodes Scholar.
• Editor of The Best American Science Writing 2006
• Selected three times to appear in the annual Best American Essays collection and in Best American Science Writing for six of the last seven years.

Education

B.A.S. from Stanford University,

M.A. in politics, philosophy, and economics, Oxford University,

M.D. from Harvard Medical School,

M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health.