Doctor Brian Goldman, emergency physician, author and very excellent broadcaster – host of CBCs White Coat Black Art gives a talk – Redefining the Practice of Medicine -at TED^x Toronto 2011  event.

“I think we need to do something about a piece of the culture of medicine that has to change.. and I think it starts with one physician, and that’s me.”

Dr Brian Goldman talks with frank, honest courage about his own role in our current culture of practicing medicine – which attempts to deny that mistakes happen and which in turn leads to more mistakes happening because it is impossible for us to learn from those that we know do occur:

one in ten medications administered in hospital is either the wrong medication or the wrong dose

and as many as 24,000 patients die

yet the culture and the system continues to deny that mistakes happen.

Dr Goldman talks with unerring honesty about his own fallibility –

“I’d like to be able to tell you I don’t make istakes, I’d like to be able to tell you that I made my worst mistakes in my first five years of practice but I can’t. Some of my doozies have been  in the last five years.”

…with great courage of the “unhealthy shame that exists in our culture of medicine”

“- not the healthy kind that you can talk about with colleagues that is a teacher

but the unhealthy shame that makes you so sick inside – the one that tells you not that what you did is bad but that you are bad…because that was what I was feeling…

then I was cleansed and went back again… till the next time and it happened again…

Alone, shamed, unsupported – here’s the problem: If I can’t come clean and talk about my mistakes, if I can’t find the still, small voice that tells me what really happened and I share with my colleagues… how can I teach them what I did so they don’t do the same things?

I do make mistakes but I do promise to learn one thing : to pass on to others in hope they do not make the same mistakes.

When the system is run by humans there will be mistakes, and we need to let it evolve to create backups for when those mistakes happen.”

Thank you, Dr Goldman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTB2aPuQ4RY&feature=player_embedded#!

Related articles

• BLOG: Dr. Brian Goldman (cbc.ca)
• Moving Medical Messages – The Dr. Brian Goldman TEDxToronto 2011 Talk is Inspiring (TrendHunter.com) (trendhunter.com)
• Generation Rx (recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com)