Both editors are active duty officers and surgeons in the U.S. Army. Dr. Martin is a fellowship trained trauma surgeon who is currently the Trauma Medical Director at Madigan Army Medical Center. He has served as the Chief of Surgery with the 47th Combat Support Hospital (CSH) in Tikrit, Iraq in 2005 to 2006, and most recently as the Chief of Trauma and General Surgery with the 28th CSH in Baghdad, Iraq in 2007 to 2008. He has published multiple peer-reviewed journal articles and surgical chapters. He presented his latest work analyzing trauma-related deaths in the current war and strategies to reduce them at the 2008 annual meeting of the American College of Surgeons. Dr. Beekley is the former Trauma Medical Director at Madigan Army Medical Center. He has multiple combat deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, and has served in a variety of leadership roles with both Forward Surgical Teams (FST) and Combat Support Hospitals (CSH).
#1 International Bestseller: A frontline trauma surgeon tells his “riveting” true story of operating in the world’s most dangerous war zones (The Times). For more than twenty-five years, surgeon David Nott has volunteered in some of the world’s most perilous conflict zones. From Sarajevo under siege in 1993 to clandestine hospitals in rebel-held eastern Aleppo, he has carried out lifesaving operations in the most challenging conditions, and with none of the resources of a major metropolitan hospital. He is now widely acknowledged as the most experienced trauma surgeon in the world. War Doctor is his extraordinary story, encompassing his surgeries in nearly every major conflict zone since the end of the Cold War, as well as his struggles to return to a “normal” life and routine after each trip. Culminating in his recent trips to war-torn Syria—and the untold story of his efforts to help secure a humanitarian corridor out of besieged Aleppo to evacuate some 50,000 people—War Doctor is a heart-stopping and moving blend of medical memoir, personal journey, and nonfiction thriller that provides unforgettable, at times raw, insight into the human toll of war. “Superb . . . You are constantly amazed that men such as Nott can witness the extraordinary cruelties of the human race, so many and so foul, yet keep going.” —Sunday Times “Gripping and fascinating medical stories.” —Kirkus Reviews
Fundamentals of Frontline Surgery is an easy to read text, written by world class faculty, that provides clinicians with succinct and didactic information about what to do in high intensity, resource limited situations.With global conflicts and humanitarian emergencies on the rise, there has been a dramatic uptake in the number of volunteers for both military and humanitarian operations. This manual aids best practice and fast decision making in the field.
Real leadership that leads to high engagement, higher performance, and a culture of accountability As president and CEO of Scripps Health, one of America's most prestigious health systems, Chris Van Gorder presided over a dramatic turnaround, catapulting Scripps from near bankruptcy to a dominant market position. While hospitals and health systems nationwide have laid people off or are closing their doors, Scripps is financially healthy, has added thousands of employees (even with a no-layoff philosophy), and has developed a reputation as a top employer. What are the secrets to this remarkable story? In The Front-Line Leader, Chris Van Gorder candidly shares his own incredible story, from police officer to CEO, and the leadership philosophy that drives all of his decisions and actions: people come first. Van Gorder began his unlikely career as a California police officer, which deeply instilled in him a sense of social responsibility, honesty, and public service. After being injured on the job and taking an early retirement, Van Gorder had to reinvent himself, taking a job as a hospital security director, a job that would change his life. Through hard work and determination, he rose to executive ranks, eventually becoming CEO of Scripps. But he never forgot his own roots and powerful work ethic, or the time when he was a security officer and a CEO would not make eye contact with him. Van Gorder leads from the front lines, making it a priority to know his employees and customers at every level. His values learned on the force—protecting the community, educating citizens, developing caring relationships, and ultimately doing the right thing—shape his approach to business. As much as companies talk about accountability, managers seldom understand what practical steps to take to achieve an ethic of service that makes accountability meaningful. The Front-Line Leader outlines specific tactics and steps anyone can use starting today to take responsibility, inspire others, and achieve breakout results for their organizations. Van Gorder reveals how a no-layoff philosophy led to higher accountability, how his own attention to seemingly minor details spurred larger change, and how his own high standards for himself and his team improved morale and productivity. From general strategy to the tiny, everyday steps leaders can take to create the kind of culture and accountability that translates into major competitive advantage, The Front-Line Leader charts a path to better leadership and a more engaged, higher-performing organization.
Rooted in everyday hospital medicine, Palliative Skills for Frontline Clinicians addresses the challenges of delivering complex care to patients living with serious illnesses. Spanning emergency medicine, internal medicine, surgery and various subspecialties, each chapter reads like a story, comparing usual care with a step-by-step palliative-based approach. This case-based book features a multidisciplinary, palliative-trained authorship, including neurologists, nephrologists, emergency physicians, surgeons, intensivists, and obstetricians. Divided into four parts, Palliative Skills for Frontline Clinicians outlines common clinical scenarios across settings and specialties to highlight unmet needs of patients with potentially terminal illnesses. Each case is broken down into the usual standard approach, and delves into detail regarding different palliative interventions that can be appropriate in those scenarios. These are meant to be practice changing; down to the actual words used to communicate with patients. In addition to the book’s focus on the principles of palliative care and the “art” of treating the patient, approaches to communication with the patient’s families for the best long-term outcomes are discussed. Concise and pragmatic, Palliative Skills for Frontline Clinicians is meant to be practice changing. It provides readers with both a new conceptual framework, as well as actual words to communicate with patients and medication doses for symptom management. It is an invaluable resource for non-palliative trained clinicians who wish to strengthen their palliative care skills.
As a pediatric surgeon, Catherine Musemeche operates on the smallest of human beings, manipulates organs the size of walnuts, and uses sutures as thin as hairs to resolve matters of life or death. Working in the small space of a premature infant's chest or abdomen allows no margin for error. It is a world rife with emotion and risk. Small takes readers inside this rarefied world of pediatric medicine, where children and newborns undergo surgery to resolve congenital defects or correct the damages caused by accidents and disease. It is an incredibly high-stakes endeavor, nerve-wracking and fascinating. Small: Life and Death on the Front Lines of Pediatric Surgery is a gripping story about a still little-known frontier. In writing about patients and their families, Musemeche recounts the history of the developing field of pediatric surgery--so like adult medicine in many ways, but at the same time utterly different. This is a field guide to the state of the art and science of operating on the smallest human beings, the hurts and maladies that afflict them, and the changing nature of medicine in America today, told by an exceptionally gifted surgeon and writer.
A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine. Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This book is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is -- complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human. Atul Gawande offers an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur and why good surgeons go bad. He also shows us what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable: an architect with incapacitating back pain for which there is no physical cause; a young woman with nausea that won't go away; a television newscaster whose blushing is so severe that she cannot do her job. Gawande offers a richly detailed portrait of the people and the science, even as he tackles the paradoxes and imperfections inherent in caring for human lives. At once tough-minded and humane, Complications is a new kind of medical writing, nuanced and lucid, unafraid to confront the conflicts and uncertainties that lie at the heart of modern medicine, yet always alive to the possibilities of wisdom in this extraordinary endeavor. Complications is a 2002 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.
Specialty Volume of Textbooks of Military Medicine. TMM. Edited by Shawn Christian Nessen, Dave Edmond Lounsbury, and Stephen P. Hetz. Foreword by Bob Woodruff. Prepared especially for medical personnel. Provides the fundamental principles and priorities critical in managing the trauma of modern warfare. Contains concise supplemental material for military surgeons deploying or preparing to deploy to a combat theater.
New Zealand-born Doug Jolly was one of the greatest war surgeons of the twentieth century. Tireless, dedicated and courageous in his surgical work with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, his surgical manual, based on battlefield experiences close to the front line, was widely used in later conflicts.Frontline Surgeon traces Jolly' s remarkable career and restores him to the ranks of pioneers of modern medicine.
Katrina Firlik is a neurosurgeon, one of only two hundred or so women among the alpha males who dominate this high-pressure, high-prestige medical specialty. She is also a superbly gifted writer–witty, insightful, at once deeply humane and refreshingly wry. In Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, Dr. Firlik draws on this rare combination to create a neurosurgeon’s Kitchen Confidential–a unique insider’s memoir of a fascinating profession. Neurosurgeons are renowned for their big egos and aggressive self-confidence, and Dr. Firlik confirms that timidity is indeed rare in the field. “They’re the kids who never lost at musical chairs,” she writes. A brain surgeon is not only a highly trained scientist and clinician but also a mechanic who of necessity develops an intimate, hands-on familiarity with the gray matter inside our skulls. It’s the balance between cutting-edge medical technology and manual dexterity, between instinct and expertise, that Firlik finds so appealing–and so difficult to master. Firlik recounts how her background as a surgeon’s daughter with a strong stomach and a keen interest in the brain led her to this rarefied specialty, and she describes her challenging, atypical trek from medical student to fully qualified surgeon. Among Firlik’s more memorable cases: a young roofer who walked into the hospital with a three-inch-long barbed nail driven into his forehead, the result of an accident with his partner’s nail gun, and a sweet little seven-year-old boy whose untreated earache had become a raging, potentially fatal infection of the brain lining. From OR theatrics to thorny ethical questions, from the surprisingly primitive tools in a neurosurgeon’s kit to glimpses of future techniques like the “brain lift,” Firlik cracks open medicine’s most prestigious and secretive specialty. Candid, smart, clear-eyed, and unfailingly engaging, Another Day in the Frontal Lobe is a mesmerizing behind-the-scenes glimpse into a world of incredible competition and incalculable rewards.
