Quotes About Healthcare

two-thirds of such complications were due to errors in care.

It was estimated that, nationwide, upward of forty-four thousand patients die each year at least partly as a result of errors in care.

Medicine is, I have found, a strange and in many ways disturbing business.

Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.

fewer than 2 percent of the patients who had received substandard care ever filed suit. Conversely, only a small minority among the patients who did sue had in fact been the victims of negligent care.

We've created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets—and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win.

And a patient's likelihood of winning a suit depended primarily on how poor his or her outcome was, regardless of whether that outcome was caused by disease or unavoidable risks of care.

But scientific advances have turned the processes of aging and dying into medical experiences

percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics

MODERN SCIENTIFIC CAPABILITY has profoundly altered the course of human life. People live longer and better than at any other time in history. But scientific advances have turned the processes of aging and dying into medical experiences, matters to be managed by health care professionals

The professionals and institutions we turn to should...not confine people's choices, in the name of safety, but to expand them, in the name of living a worthwhile life.

lives. As pervasive as medicine has become in modern life, it remains mostly hidden and often misunderstood.

The job of doctors is to supply up-to-date knowledge and skills. The job of patients is to supply the decisions.

The doctors were often not recognized to be dangerous until they had done considerable damage.

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions.

Little more than a decade ago, doctors made the decisions; patients did what they were told.

Each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, two million Americans acquire an infection while they are in the hospital. Ninety thousand die of that infection. The

And they missed out on treatments that they might have preferred.

he didn't understand why I hadn't called him when there were clear signs of airway trouble developing.

So the night before the operation he did an unusual thing: he discussed the treatment options with her and let her choose.

Paul O'Neill, the former secretary of the Treasury and CEO of the aluminum giant Alcoa, agreed to take over as head of a regional health care initiative in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And he made solving the problem of hospital infections one of his top priorities.

Most doctors, taking seriously the idea that patients should control their own fates, lay out the options and the risks involved.

But now he was adamant about doing "everything." David did not dare argue with him.

I need to understand how much you're willing to go through to have a shot at being alive and what level of being alive is tolerable to you.