Promising Care: How We Can Rescue Health Care by Improving It

From the Commentaries "'My Right Knee' was a personal turning point for me, and it raised the bar for the health care industry ... I wasn't quite prepared to hear a speech that would provide a defining moment in my own leadership journey and quest for quality." —Gary S. Kaplan, MD "Tomorrow's leaders will need Berwick's stunning ability to bridge and balance tensions without collapsing them, to hold contradictions." —Diana Chapman Walsh, PhD "As in all of his speeches, whether to an audience unfamiliar with the mortal drama of illness and privation or to those steeped in its complexities, Don Berwick signals the urgency and pathos of a wounded world." —Paul Farmer, MD, PhD "Dr. Berwick is masterful at the use of stories to convey memorable and vivid messages that are vital to the humanistic core as well as the modern challenge of medicine." —Christine K. Cassel, MD "It takes someone like Don Berwick to shake us out of our biomedical mindset and remind us that we are dealing not just with a disease, but with a person often buffeted by factors we can't quantify or control." —Mark D. Smith, MD, MBA

Preface Author Bio Commentary Author Bios Chapter 1 My Right Knee (Commentary by Gary S. Kaplan) Chapter 2 Some is not a Number Soon…is Not a Time (Commentary by C. Joseph McCannon) Chapter 3 Power (Commentary Dale Ann Micalizzi) Chapter 4 Mont Sainte–Victoire (Commentary by Jason Leitch) Chapter 5 A Message for Ramesh (Commentary by Paul Farmer) Chapter 6 Eating Soup with a Fork (Commentary by Paul B. Batalden) Chapter 7 What “Patient–Centered” Should Mean: Confessions of an Extremist (Commentary by Frederick S. Southwick) Chapter 8 Tense (Commentary by Jessica Berwick) Chapter 9  A Transatlantic Review of the NHS at 60 (Commentary by Lord Nigel Crisp) Chapter 10 The Epitaph of Profession (Commentary by Christine K. Cassel) Chapter 11 Squirrel (Commentary by Diana Chapman Walsh) Chapter 12 You Decide (Commentary by Beverley H. Johnson) Chapter 13 The Moral Test (Commentary by Tom Daschle) Chapter 14 New Health System ‒ New Professionalism (Commentary by James Reason) Chapter 15 To Isaiah (Commentary by Mark D. Smith) Chapter 16 “. . .and Max Said, ‘No.’”

Donald M. Berwick , MD, MPP, FRCP, is president emeritus and senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), an organization that he cofounded and led for eighteen years. He is one of the nation's leading authorities on health care quality and improvement. In July 2010, President Obama appointed Dr. Berwick to the position of administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which he held until December 2011. A pediatrician by background, Dr. Berwick has served as clinical professor of Pediatrics and Health Care Policy at the Harvard Medical School, professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a member of the staffs of Boston Children's Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Berwick is the author of Escape Fire and coauthor of the books, Curing Health Care and New Rules , also available from Jossey-Bass.