Noreena Hertz 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.

We are spending most of our time in American health care fixing the mistakes that either we in the profession are causing or our patients are, without recognizing it, causing to themselves.

Doctors are just people and they can make mistakes.

The best doctors and the best hospitals in America, if they cannot get the patient information they need when they need it, it can lead to morbid consequences: Higher mortality.

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

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

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?

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

A great doctor kills more people than a great general.

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.

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.

I confidently affirm that the greater part of those who are supposed to have died of gout, have died of the medicine rather than the disease - a statement in which I am supported by observation.

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

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.

We strive for error-free medicine in a world that is sometimes all too human.

Safe care saves lives and saves money. Adverse events like high levels of infection, blood clots or falls in hospital, emergency readmissions and pressure sores cost the NHS billions of pounds every year. There is a serious human cost, too, with patients ending up injured, or even dead. Most are avoidable with the right care.

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.

It may seem a strange principal to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm.

The blunders of a doctor are felt not by himself but by others.

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.

English doctors have killed 3/4 of my friends & the joke is the remaining 1/4 go on recommending them, so odd is human nature.

There is alas no law against incompetency; no striking example is made. They learn by our bodily jeopardy and make experiments until the death of the patients, and the doctor is the only person not punished for murder.

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.

Too often, hospital staff are incented by management to get work done without worrying about care, and clinicians are too often not even trained to think about care.

Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.