Assistant Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School General and Endocrine Surgeon, Brigham and Women's Hospital
Assistant Professor in the HSPH Department of Health Policy and Management
MacArthur Award Recipient: 2006
Dr. Gawande works at the nexus of medicine, public health, and media. He is a practicing surgeon who writes about the medical world in both The New Yorker and The New England Journal of Medicine. In 2002, he published a book of essays, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, which became a finalist for a National Book Award. In that year, the book was named Amazon.com's best nonfiction title, and Time magazine called it one of the year's five best.
At HSPH, Dr. Gawande is in the vanguard of health systems research. His research focuses on improving health systems, particularly in reducing medical errors. He was part of a team that analyzed 15,000 patient records from Colorado and Utah hospitals, and found that three percent of patients suffered death, disability, or a prolonged hospital stay from some form of error, the researchers found. Two-thirds of mistakes occurred in surgery, either in the OR or in decision making outside of it. Half of these missteps were avoidable.
In another study, he found that the number one risk factor for mistakes made by surgeons was inexperience on the part of the surgeons. He has examined data on how often and what kind of instruments sometimes are left inside patients after surgery. He is part of group of researchers, led by HSPH Adjunct Professor Lucian Leape, who emphasize the need to address failures in systems—not in individual doctors—to reduce medical error. To that end, Dr. Gawande is the Assistant Director of the Center for Surgery and Public Health, a joint collaboration of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and HSPH.
In its award to Dr. Gawande, the MacArthur Foundation noted, “In articles published in professional journals and mainstream periodicals, Gawande scrutinizes the culture, protocol, and technology of modern medical practice from the perspective of a dedicated and empathetic professional. In all his published work, he brings fresh and unique perspective, clarity, and intuition to the field. Recognizing the reality of human failures in an imperfect craft, Gawande is equally energetic and imaginative in the identification of practical changes and solutions. Among his innovations are bar codes to prevent surgeons from inadvertently leaving sponges and instruments in patients and a simple score of one to ten indicating the likelihood of complications.”
Said HSPH Dean Barry Bloom: "We are enormously gratified that this is the fourth member of our faculty to be awarded a MacArthur fellowship. We feel privileged to have someone with his surgical perspective, his novel research, and literary talent to convey some of the most important public health issues in this country and abroad to a wider audience."
Dr. Gawande received a B.A.S. (1987) from Stanford University, an M.A. (1989) from the University of Oxford, an M.D. (1995) from Harvard Medical School, and an M.P.H. (1999) from HSPH. Since 2003, he has been an assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and a surgeon in the Division of General and Gastrointestinal Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Since 2004, he has served as an assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at HSPH and as assistant director of the Center for Surgery and Public Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and writes the “Notes of a Surgeon” column for the New England Journal of Medicine.
To read more about Dr. Gawande, visit:
- Gawande Recognized for Science Writing, Harvard Public Health NOW, December 9, 2005
- “The Pen and Scalpel,” Harvard Public Health Review, Spring 2005
- Class Day Address, Harvard Medical School, The Character of a Doctor
- Military Casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan Show 10 Percent Mortality Rate, Lowest Ever in Wartime, press release of December 8, 2004.
- HSPH Faculty Research Page