Escape Fire: A Quest for Sustainable Healthcare

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Escape Fire, is a collection of eleven speeches that Dr. Donald Berwick, co-founder and president of the US Institute for Healthcare Improvement, spoke about in the annual meetings of the National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care between 1992 and 2002. The three main issues that are at the core of all these speeches are: focusing on the suffering, building and using knowledge, and cooperation. . This article explores the possibilities to tackle these issues (escape fires), in order to create a sustainable healthcare system. Dr. Berwick paints a correlation between the combustible healthcare system, and a forest fire that ignited in Mann Gulch, Montana in 1949, for which the article is named. In this fire, the foreman, Wag Dodge, …show more content…

In 1998, the American Customer Satisfaction Index rated Americans’ satisfaction with hospitals at 70 percent, just below the U.S. Postal Service (71%) and just above the Internal Revenue Service (69%)”. Reading this, and experiencing the healthcare in our country first-hand provides enough evidence that our system is a burning fire and the author is right. I don’t think the author wants the reader to simply agree with him, rather he wants to educate the readers about our broken healthcare system and how we should try to fix it as a whole, not just a Band-Aid approach, and that everyone has a voice, and we need to work together to come up with solutions. I whole-heartedly agree with what Dr. Berwick was saying. If nothing changes, it’s only going to get

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