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A few years ago, a critical care specialist at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center recognized that about one-third of the time doctors skipped a significant step in the ICU that contributed to an 11 percent rate of infection, lengthier hospital stays, and even patient fatalities. In an experiment, he adopted a strategy, so elementary and so obvious, it seemed silly – and it worked.
The steps that led to a dramatic turnaround at Johns Hopkins is told in the opening pages of The Checklist Manifesto – How to Get Things Right, the 2009 best-seller written by Brigham and Women’s Hospital general and endocrine surgeon Dr. Atul Gawande, the April 27 speaker for the Distinguished Lecture Series at Newton Country Day School of the Sacred Heart. A prolific writer, Dr. Gawande is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He leads the World Health Organization’s Safe Surgery Saves Lives program. During the Clinton administration he was a senior advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services and director of one of the administration’s Health Care Task Force committees.
Dr. Gawande has written extensively on medicine and public health for The New Yorker, Slate, and the New England Journal of Medicine. His essays have appeared in The Best American Essays 2003 and The Best American Science Writing 2002.
The New York Times Best-Selling author of Complications (2002), a National Book Award finalist, and Better (2007), Dr. Gawande has distinguished himself as a compelling writer and storyteller.
In The Checklist Manifesto, Dr. Gawande skillfully transports the reader through the frenzied corridors of hospital emergency rooms, around the geometric complexity of steel columns of a skyscraper in construction, and into the cockpit of a Boeing aircraft prepared for take-off. The thoroughness of his research, his riveting style of writing, and his compassion for the real people he incorporates into his series of essays dovetails seamlessly with the precision he commands in the operating room for the more than 250 surgeries he performs a year.
Dr. Gawande clearly relishes his field of medicine – and his skill as an eloquent writer of non-fiction. He masterfully weaves colorful and detailed information from a broad spectrum of professions with a surgeon’s perspective, sensitivity, wit, and a bit of self-deprecating humor. His stories are crafted to mesmerize the reader. The lowly checklist is resurrected and applied to the rescue of an Austrian drowning victim underwater for more than 30-minutes, a financially failing inner-city hospital in Detroit, and a Boston skyscraper with seriously tilting upper story floors. The checklist comes into play as horrific scenarios in the aftermath of the Katrina chaos are unraveled and re-pieced, a plane spirals out of control toward London, and the unpredictability of the dinner rush in the kitchen of one of Boston’s top restaurants, Rialto, is adeptly engineered. Through his writing, the reader witnesses how the ordinary checklist becomes an extraordinary tool across all professions.
Stanford and Harvard educated, Dr. Gawande is the son of a urologist and a pediatrician and is a Rhodes Scholar. He lives in Newton with his wife and three children. Newton Country Day School is proud to have Dr. Atul Gawande as its 2010 Distinguished Lecturer.
Dr. Gawande is the ninth speaker to the annual Newton Country Day School Distinguished Lecture Series. The event will take place at 7:30 P.M. in the Sweeney Husson Theatre and be followed with a book signing. His book, The Checklist Manifesto, will be available for purchase at the book signing.
The Elaine Duffey Zani ’72 Fund
The Distinguished Lecture Series is made possible by the Elaine Duffey Zani ’72 Fund. Endowed in 1999 with gifts given in memory of Elaine, her parents Tom and Mary Elcock Duffey, and her aunt Eleanor Elcock Strapp, the Fund brings celebrated speakers to the school. The Distinguished Lecture Series extends Sacred Heart education to the wider community.
For reservations and information about the Elaine Duffey Zani ’72 Fund, please contact the Development Office at 617-244-4246 or development@newtoncountryday.org.
Distinguished Lecturers 2002-2009
Robert Pinsky - US Poet Laureate
Billy Collins - US Poet Laureate
Thomas H. O’Connor - Professor of History Emeritus at Boston College
Edward J. Markey – United States Representative
Seamus Heaney - Nobel Laureate in Literature
Mary Oliver - Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Charles M. Sennott - The Boston Globe
Cathy E. Minehan - Vice Chair and Partner, Arlington Advisory Partners
Former President and Chief Executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
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