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Atul Gawande gave a TED talk on the benefits of coaching

Coaching isn’t just good for athletes—it can also help professionals from doctors to lawyers to scientists to musicians get better at what they do, according to Atul Gawande.

Gawande, professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Health and director of Ariadne Labs, a health systems innovation center, gave a TED talk earlier this year about how professionals could benefit from coaching. He recounted how, as a younger surgeon, he saw his complication rates go down after a former professor observed him in the operating room and made suggestions for improvement.

Improvements in quality also occurred in rural birthing centers in Uttar Pradesh—India’s most populous state, with some of the highest birth mortality rates in the country—during an Ariadne-run trial in which birth attendants and managers at the centers were coached on use of the World Health Organization’s Safe Childbirth Checklist. Tracking results across 160,000 births, the study found that health workers in a control group—who were asked to use the checklist but didn’t receive coaching—delivered on only one-third of 18 basic practices over a four-month period. But those who got four months of coaching were completing two-thirds of the practices by the end of the study period.

“Coaching helped them learn to execute the fundamentals,” Gawande said.

Listen to Atul Gawande’s TED talk: Want to get great at something? Get a coach

Listen to Atul Gawande on the December 22, 2017 TED Radio HourMedicine Has Become A Team Sport — So How Do We Treat It Like One?

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Checklist and coaching program in India markedly improved childbirth care but did not reduce death rates (Harvard Chan School release)