Quotes About Care

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.

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.

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.

Block has a list of questions that she aims to cover with sick patients in the time before decisions have to be made: What do they understand their prognosis to be, what are their concerns about what lies ahead, what kinds of trade-offs are they willing to make, how do they want to spend their time if their health worsens, who do they want to make decisions if they can't?

I was learning. In medicine, we have long faced a conflict between the imperative to give patients the best possible care and the need to provide novices with experience. Residencies attempt to mitigate potential harm through supervision and graduated responsibility. And there is reason to think patients actually

AT THE CENTER of Wilson's work was an attempt to solve a deceptively simple puzzle: what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves?

What do they understand their prognosis to be, what are their concerns about what lies ahead, what kinds of trade-offs are they willing to make, how do they want to spend their time if their health worsens, who do they want to make decisions if they can't?

help people in a state of dependence sustain the value of existence.

The side effects are not life-threatening, but they are not trivial. The

what treatments they were being given

Nursing homes have come a long way from the firetrap warehouses of neglect they used to be. But it seems we've succumbed to a belief that, once you lose your physical independence, a life of worth and freedom is simply not possible.

what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves?

Effort does matter; diligence and attention to the minutest details can save you.

In contemporary societies, by contrast, old age and infirmity have gone from being a shared, multigenerational responsibility to a more or less private state—

The way we saw it, and the way our professors saw it, the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise.

Wilson is still trying to work out how ordinary people can age without having to choose between neglect and institutionalization. It remains among the most uncomfortable questions we face.

Thirteen minutes after I took him off the ventilator

This simple but profound service—to grasp a fading man's need for everyday comforts, for companionship, for help achieving his modest aims—is the thing that is still so devastatingly lacking more than a century later.

Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul.

The soaring cost of health care has become the greatest threat to the long-term solvency of most advanced nations, and the incurable account for a lot of it. In the United States, 25 percent of all Medicare spending is for the 5 percent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months that is of little apparent benefit.

BILL THOMAS WANTED to remake the nursing home.

they provided assisted living, but no one seemed to think it was their job to actually assist him with living

Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once.