Escape Fire: Designs for the Future of Health Care

doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7448.1139

BMJ 2004;328:1139 (8 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7448.1139

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Escape Fire: Designs for the Future of Health Care

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

This is a collection of 11 speeches that Dr Donald Berwick,cofounder and president of the US Institute for Healthcare Improvement,delivered to the annual meetings of the National Forum on QualityImprovement in Health Care between 1992 and 2002.

Donald M Berwick

Jossey Bass, $30,pp 352 ISBN 0 7879 7217 7

Also available as an e-book www.josseybass.com

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Berwick is modest about his institute and his work, asking inthe preface to this anthology, "With so much different, whydo these speeches strike me as so repetitive? Metaphor aftermetaphor, list after list, story after story—but alwaysthe same. Year after year I can find only three messages atthe core: focus on the suffering, build and use knowledge, andcooperate."

But he's also a realist. For more than a decade Berwick hasbeen pushing for a US healthcare system that puts patients'needs above those . . . [Full text of this article]

David Woods, chief executive officer

Healthcare Media International, Philadelphia dwoods@healthpublishing.com