Michael Burgess Quotes

I think we are faced in medicine with the reality that we have to be willing to talk about our failures and think hard about them, even despite the malpractice system. I mean, there are things that we can do to make that system better.

I think that the general public understands that its own doctors are human, fallible, and flawed.

If people understood that doctors weren't divine, perhaps the odor of malpractice might diminish.

In medicine, all over the world, there are always going to be mistakes made.

With tens of thousands of patients dying every year from preventable medical errors, it is imperative that we embrace available technologies and drastically improve the way medical records are handled and processed.

Operating-room errors hold a special terror for patients, if only because they seem like the most avoidable kind of complications. The occasional horror stories of patients who have the wrong leg removed or the wrong knee replaced generate the most headlines, as do tales of patients whose identities are mixed up entirely.

The politics have always been difficult in medicine. There is some truth in the way medical practice is portrayed in TV dramas.

Even top caliber hospitals cannot escape medical mistakes that sometimes result in irreparable damage to patients.

Doctors are just people and they can make mistakes.

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.

A great doctor kills more people than a great general.

Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.

The present system of protecting NHS patients was a bit of a shambles.

When you're dealing with a very sick person and you're doing something to them, an intervention, be it a procedure or a medication, safety is critical.

You want to challenge experts, because experts get a lot wrong. Doctors misdiagnose one time in five. In the U.S. and Canada, 50,000 people die every year who would not have had to.

You know, 97 percent of the time, if you come into a hospital, everything goes well. But three percent of the time, we have major complications.

Health care organizations don't ask us to interface to every type of module because they understand that it could cause safety problems.

There is a pervasive lack of accountability in medicine that extends from the most newly qualified doctor right through the most senior professors.

Doctors can do almost anything nowadays, can't they, unless they kill you while they're trying to cure you.

If we are going to keep patients safe, then we have to make sure that doctors are able to learn from mistakes.

When it comes to my health, I would rather my doctor base her decisions on science rather than what she, or some lawyer, thinks will stand up in court.

Health IT helps save lives now lost due to preventable medical errors, from incorrect diagnoses and needless infections to drug mix-ups and surgical mishaps.

It's O.K. if you've got a smartphone app or a social network, and you go live with it before it's ready; people aren't going to die. But with medicine, it's different.

There is no shortage of embarrassing facts about healthcare, and people die every day in the U.S. due to preventable errors - would you fly planes if you knew several of them would drop out of the sky every day?

Healthcare is a conservative marketplace.