Atul Gawande, MD, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and healthcare writer, said medical professionals' traditionally autonomous and cowboy-like mindset will only hurt healthcare, according to a National Public Radio interview transcript.
In the interview, Dr. Gawande said healthcare professionals have thrived as "cowboys," acting independently, but now need to change their mentalities to better work as teams.
He recalled his mother's successful knee surgery last year. She spent three days in the hospital. While Dr. Gawande sat beside her, he began to count the number of nametags that would come into his mother's room, make a decision about her care or affect her care in some way.
"And I counted 63 people. Those people can't be cowboys. If they don't work together, it's incredibly expensive, things go wrong. But when they work together, it's pretty amazing," he told NPR.
Dr. Gawande also commented on the most prominent problem he sees in care delivery today: fragmentation. "I think it's partly that each doctor or any clinician — nurses and everybody else — feel we just have a piece of care. We just do our little part, and that's all we do," he told NPR. "There's no one who sees the whole. The most common complaint I hear from patients is that there doesn't seem to be anybody in charge."
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