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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. How long might it take in most hospitals to repair a hernia?

2. Who was the chief resident in charge of the procedure on a teenage knifing victim?

3. How many salespeople attended the surgeons convention?

4. How many patients a day did Goodman's physician's assistant say the man would see and not spend more than five minutes with them?

5. What statistician described a classic example of imagining patterns where really there are none when he described the Germans' bombing patterns of South London in World War II?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why did Gawande have to leave a teenage knifing victim and go tend to another emergency?

2. Why did Rowland Scott Quinlan have to give up his firm to his partners?

3. Describe the Swedish study designed to see whether a computer could more accurately read an EKG than could a human.

4. What is the physician's dodge and why is it necessary?

5. What was Hank Goodman's reputation before he lost his license?

6. What is the Texas-sharpshooter fallacy?

7. What is an EKG?

8. Why does it take so long before colleagues take effective action against a bad doctor?

9. Why was there no reason to operate on Quinlan's back?

10. Why do many experts believe that the M&M is a shabby approach to analyzing error and improving performance in medicine?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Discuss the pros and cons of having doctors agree in advance what should be done in the uncertain situations that arise (spell out actions ahead of time to remove the guesswork and get some advantage of group decision). Use examples from the book.

Essay Topic 2

Discuss the mysteries and unknowns of medicine and the struggles of what to do with them. Use examples from the book.

Essay Topic 3

Explain the two meanings of the title Complications. Use examples from the book.

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,062 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample