Nurses
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December 7, 2013 -- Click on this tweet to see a fascinating interview with a brilliant man, Dr. Atul Gawande. He's one of my heroes, cited often on this page.

His checklists have made huge improvements in surgical outcomes, and his writings have enlightened Americans about some of the most bedeviling issues in our crazed health care system.

He describes the career he expected, centering on policy, and his subsequent unexpected fascination with surgery. My own trajectory bears small similarities, with my nursing degree and license obtained with the intention of bolstering my health IT credentials. For me the surprise was the astonishing satisfactions -- privilege! -- of working at the bedside, making differences in lives. That people are even more interesting than technology is, in retrospect, not so surprising.

In my own vastly smaller way, I hope to emulate him on the nursing side of the hospital bed. Nurses, too, can benefit from checklists (though, surprisingly, it's a harder problem for nurses than it is for surgeons because our checklists describe entire shifts with many patients with widely varied problems, rather than single procedures) and offer a solution named NurseMind.

And this blog -- in which I have a lot to say about nursing and health care -- is the writing side of my hoped-for Gawande-ness. Imitation, it's said, is the highest form of flattery. Dr. Gawande, please consider yourself flattered!

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