Waltham,
Mass. – March 10th – Atul A. Gawande, M.D., M.P.H., surgeon, public health
researcher, and a leading advocate on health care and health system reform, has
been honored by the Massachusetts Medical Society as the 2017 recipient of the
Henry Ingersoll Bowditch Award for Excellence in Public Health. He will receive
the award, one of the Society’s most prestigious honors, at the organization’s
annual meeting April 28 in Boston.
Named after
a leading figure in medicine and public health in the 19th century,
the award is presented annually to a Massachusetts physician who demonstrates
creativity, commendable citizenship, initiative, innovation and leadership in
the public health and advocacy fields.
In nominating him for the award,
his colleagues recognized that Dr. Gawande is “leading a revolution in our
approach to the care of individuals with life-limiting illnesses” and that
because of his “comprehensive understanding of the forces working in
healthcare, his expertise as a general and endocrine surgeon, and his eloquence
as a speaker and a writer, the care of people with potentially life-limiting
illness is becoming more compassionate and patient-centered.”
Dr. Gawande is the Samuel O. Thier
Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, a Professor in the Department
of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health,
and a practicing surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
He is also Executive Director of
Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, Chairman of
Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally, and co-founder
and co-chair of the Massachusetts Coalition for Serious Illness Care, a group committed
to ensuring that health care for everyone in the Commonwealth reflects their
goals, values and preferences.
A graduate of Stanford University
with a B.S.S. and Oxford University with an M.A., Dr. Gawande received his M.D.
from Harvard Medical School and his M.P.H. from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of
Public Health. He was selected as a Rhodes Scholar in 1987, a MacArthur Fellow
in 2007, and a member of the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of
Medicine) in 2011.
He is a Fellow of the American
College of Surgeons and an editorial reviewer for the New England Journal of Medicine, Surgery, and Annals of
Surgery. The recipient of numerous
medical and literary awards, including two National Magazine Awards, he has
written four New York Times bestsellers - Complications, Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in
the End. He has been named one of the hundred most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy and TIME.
The Massachusetts Medical Society, with some 25,000 physicians and
student members, is dedicated to educating and advocating for the patients and
physicians of Massachusetts. The Society, under the auspices of NEJM Group,
publishes the New England Journal of Medicine, a leading global medical journal
and web site, and Journal Watch alerts and newsletters covering 13 specialties.
The Society is also a leader in continuing medical education providing
accredited and certified activities across the globe for physicians and other
health care professionals. Founded in
1781, MMS is the oldest continuously operating medical society in the country.
For more information please visit www.massmed.org, www.nejm.org, or
www.jwatch.org.
