Health care has reached a pivotal moment, renowned surgeon, author, and speaker Atul Gawande, MD, told a Lancaster audience April 5.
In a single century, medical advances have helped to virtually double life expectancy. We now have the knowledge – as well as 6,000 drugs and 4,000 medical and surgical procedures – to treat most of the 70,000 conditions that can cause the human body to fail.
“We are committed to the idea that every life is of equal worth and deserving of equal respect,” Gawande told attendees, which included Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health leadership and clinical team members.
He emphasized the importance of innovation, standardization and teamwork. The event kicked off the Healthcare Scholar Lecture Series, part of a yearlong recognition of Lancaster General Hospital’s 125th anniversary and LG Health’s historic and future commitment to clinical quality and excellence.
“Tonight we start the conversation around quality and safety, and things we can do together to improve the health of the communities we serve,” LG Health President and CEO Jan Bergen said in her introductory remarks.
Gawande also spoke of lessons learned from treating patients with serious illness through his latest book, “Being Mortal.”
“People have priorities in life they want us to serve,” he said. “Those priorities are different from person to person, and they change over time. In order to learn what those priorities are — and this is highly technical — you have to ask them. We don’t ask.”
Patients usually don’t want to survive at all costs but instead hope to live as good a life as possible until the end. He recalled one patient who simply wanted to be able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV.
“We have a higher purpose… using our medical capabilities to help people live the life they want,” Gawande said. “This is hard. This is a generation’s worth of work. This is the work we get to do.”