Audio Summary

MP3 length 3:38 | size 1.7 MB

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Attendee response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic...

The dialogue between featured speakers Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point & Blink and Dr. Atul Gawande, author of Complications...

• “The contrast of their perspectives is interesting and provocative”
• “Thought provoking – two of the best brains in the 21st century”
• “Malcolm’s perspective was fascinating and was a great tie in with Dr. Gawande’s medical perspective”

The breakout sessions also brought rave reviews...

• “Tremendous; A treasure! One of the best events I’ve attended.”
• “I heard about these wonderful simulations and all these things that they are doing. I’m just not sure that we are putting the same emphasis on patient safety. I would like to see how the things that I have learned here can be applied to our organization.”
• “It brought sharp clarity with how we need to organize around quality safety and risk.”

An attendee traveled from Holland and found many useful guidelines...

• “You’re good people who are busy with this [patient safety] issue and there are a lot of things written down about it. We need to learn from America in this case.”
• “I am a manager in this hospital and I am sitting in a committee with the president of our hospital, which handles the patient safety in our whole hospital. I need to advise them about how we can handle it in our hospital.”

Our Harvard-affiliated faculty was also impressed:

• “It’s in your own self-interest to reduce the stress in your life as a consequence of adverse outcomes. If you’re not coming for the welfare of the patient, come for your own welfare.”
• “The non-medical people coming and providing examples from their fields of work that can easily be applied to the medical world has been an eye-opener for me.”
• “I don’t think that [attendance to this conference] should be voluntary because you wind up talking to the converted and what you really need is one or two levels below the converted to become converted. You’ve got to be brain dead not to get some conversion after a day and a half or two days here.”