Better Health: Smart Health Commentary Better Health (TM): smart health commentary

Latest Posts

Medicine, Car Racing, And Teamwork

There’s an article in the Oct 20, 2010 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) which discusses surgical team training and teamwork in the operating room.

Most surgeons have crews or individuals in the operating rooms they prefer to work along side. Things just go smoother. We work more as a team, more as one.

Why? Personalities. Communication styles that work well together. Skills that compliment. Each person knows and does their job, not trying to do someone else’s. Each knowing that even the smallest task is important to the whole.

Ideally, we could create teams like this at all times in the operating room. In reality, its not so easy. Change in personnel happens. Team members get sick, so there is great need for crosstraining and flexibility. Personnel (including surgeons) need to be able to work with these changes.

I know currently the comparison is to racecar teams that change the tires, etc. with great efficiency or the aviation industry with their checklists. While we should learn from these industries, we must not forget that medicine is far more diverse. Surgeries are not all the same. The cars are. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

Read more »

How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

Read more »

See all interviews »

Latest Cartoon

See all cartoons »

Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

Read more »

The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

Read more »

Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles