Examining the future of medicine

The Reith Lectures 2014 were given in the final few weeks of last year, by a distinguished surgeon from the US, and were very thought provoking. Atul Gawande manages to undertake a full time consultant surgeon’s position at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston in conjunction with being a professor at Harvard, while writing regularly for the New York Times, as well as producing best-selling books on a variety of topics related to medicine. Being Mortal, the last book, was published in October last year, and examines what he calls the medicalisation of ageing and focuses on how we are failing our elderly to enable them to have a good death. This topic was also the subject of one of the four in the series of Reith Lectures.

Safe Surgery Saves Lives

Atul Gawande is best known to a British healthcare audience as the leader of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Patient Safety Alliance second challenge: ‘Safe Surgery Saves Lives’. He has been in the UK on a number of occasions, following the launch by the National Patient Safety Agency in January 2009. He led the initial meetings at WHO, then kept the motivation of the smaller teams on track. The pilot schemes undertaken by hospitals in eight of the WHO regions were written up and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showing astounding results that by the use of a simple checklist, mortality and morbidity in surgery could be diminished by 36%. Since the global launch of the checklist, it has been taken on into operating theatres around the world and is making the lives of surgical patients safer.