Dave deBronkart Quotes

There's a culture inside the NHS that is highly paternalistic. You know, 'We give them the service and they are grateful.' We have to move to shared decision-making.

Our interaction as patients with the NHS should be on the basis that there's a presumption that all information is shared with us.

I'm an e-patient: equipped, enabled, empowered, engaged. I'm no clinician, but I do everything in my power to help them, to play an active role in my own care, and even in the design of care.

Brain surgery couldn't happen without the patient's own active voice to guide the work. The patient is part of the surgical team here, perhaps the most important part, and above all, that's what makes neurosurgery different.

Have a hand in your own treatment. I have nothing but praise for our doctors, but I think they could help us better, and we can help them if we work together.

Value in medicine depends on information - as I said in 'Let Patients Help,' 'People perform better when they're informed better.' It follows that to make patients and families more effective in care, they need to know more.

I am here on behalf of all the patients that I have ever met, all the ones I haven't met. This is about letting patients play a more active role ... in fixing health care.

Patients have the right to help themselves.

We will empower patients as well as health professionals. We will disempower the hierarchy and bureaucracy.

We would like doctors to listen, but the fact is, we better be ready to be able to talk to them. You're going to have to be an active participant in that conversation, so I'd say the American people are going to need ways of stepping up to the conversation.

Please, let patients help improve healthcare. Let patients help steer our decisions, strategic and practical. Let patients help define what value in medicine is.

The consumer is really underutilized in health care.

No decision about me, without me.

I want to be clear: not all patient communities are great, any more than online communities of any sort. But when a good one gets going, boy is it sweet.

We tend not to use the biggest resource in healthcare - the patients themselves. So I'm trying to figure out possible uses for digital technologies like Facebook but also real-life social networks to improve healthcare provision.

One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is that assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind.

I'm not the typical doctor that gives patients what they want. I don't do that. I try to give them what I want as long as they're okay with that. I know what's going to match their face.

As a clinician, I would never want to be coercive in relation to a patient, nor do I harbor the illusion that as a physician I am capable of forcing someone to change their behavior, no matter how detrimental to their health.

Doctors are human; they make mistakes, and you have to stay on top of them. You have to ask the second question, the third question, the follow-up to the fourth question.

A modern health and social care system has to be completely focussed on the needs of its users.

I think the extreme complexity of medicine has become more than an individual clinician can handle. But not more than teams of clinicians can handle.

Fundamentally, the answers to our challenges in healthcare relies in engaging and empowering the individual.

My job as a physician is to make sure I have provided my patients with the best options to make the decisions that affect their lives.

We have really good data that show when you take patients and you really inform them about their choices, patients make more frugal choices. They pick more efficient choices than the health care system does.

Curious patients are more receptive to new ideas, and those who engage their health practitioners in a dialogue are much more likely to adhere to these recommendations.