No 35: The Top 5 Books That Everyone in Healthcare Should Read

We should all care about patients and how to use EBM to make them safer

1.      The History of Medicine A Very Short Introduction

2.      One Man's Medicine: An Autobiography of Professor Archie Cochrane

3.      Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals By Peter Pronovost and Eric Vohr   

4.      Better A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande

5.      The Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right by Atul Gawande

Not every student, nurse, doctor or even professor likes to read books on medicine on their time off. However, all 5 of these books are short, written in plain English and deliver a wealth of knowledge.

You could read all 5 of these in a week if you wanted to. And by the end of that week you would have a much greater understanding of modern medicine and healthcare than the vast majority of clinicians or general public.

The short history of medicine is important to give everyone a grounding. If you don’t understand the history of a topic then you can’t appreciate whether it is getting better or not. Understanding the history also helps you to understand the present.

Prof Cochrane had a fascinating life and this book is worth reading for his biography alone. I have included it on this list because he can be said to be for forefather of modern evidenced based medicine and epidemiology. He laid the ground work that much of our modern clinical practice is based on. If you don’t understand the principles of EBM then again, you can’t hope to improve patient care.

Prof Peter Pronovost wrote an excellent page turner on his crusade to improve patient care. The principles he explains are simple and effective. Yet, they have still not been fully adopted across all areas of healthcare. If you want to read just one book that will make you care about this subject, then read this one first!

Prof Gawande is world renowned. No introduction is required. Personally, I think these are his two best books but I would also include Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science. Again, he tells difficult to hear stories that hit you in the gut and make you care about the subject. He then tells you the stories of how some of these systems were made better. The Checklist Manifesto is a bit more geeky and goes through the science of how they work, but again, it should be essential reading.

If you have read these books, then I believe you have the basics of the theory of patient safety and healthcare improvement covered. More importantly, you will be aware of the huge challenges still remaining in modern healthcare and will have some ideas of how you can start to tackle them in your unit.