Medical mistakes, patient safety, and the RaDonda Vaught case | Marty Makary, M.D., M.P.H.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Marty Makary. This name, of course, sounds familiar to you as Marty has been on this podcast a number of times. Most recently, we've spent a couple of episodes discussing COVID, which I can assure you barely comes up in this episode. By way of background though, Marty is a professor at Johns Hopkins, which is where we met many years ago. He's a professor of surgery and also a public health researcher. He's a graduate of Harvard School of Public Health and served in the faculty of Hopkins for the last 16 years. He's also served in the leadership at the WHO. He's a member of the National Academy of Medicine and serves as the editor-in-chief of the second largest trade publication in medicine called MedPage Today. He writes quite regularly for The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He's also the author of two New York Times bestselling books, Unaccountable and The Price We Pay.
In this episode, we talk about patient safety, but of course the real impetus for this is the recent case of RaDonda Vaught. In case that name doesn't sound familiar, RaDonda Vaught is a nurse or a former nurse at Vanderbilt Medical Center who made a medical error that resulted in the death of a patient in late 2017 This case has garnered a lot of attention lately for reasons we will get into in this case, but the headline is that for probably the first time, certainly to anybody's recollection, a mistake of this nature was prosecuted criminally. And the implications of this are pretty significant. We talk about that a lot, but we really begin the discussion by talking about the culture of patient safety. What is the risk to a patient when they walk into the hospital? What are medical errors? How do they take place and how big a problem is it? They also talk about how much has changed in the last 20 years. And I think Marty and I were pretty lucky to train in an era that actually witnessed the transformation or witnessed the changing of the guard in terms of the attitude towards this.
So one thing to note about this podcast is that in an effort to get it out as quickly as possible, it's going to be an audio only episode and the show notes will be relatively sparse. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy my conversation about this very important topic with Marty Makary.
Hey Marty, awesome to be talking with you about this today. I'm kind of bummed that we can't do these in video, but I guess that's the nature of your other life. But anyway, no one else gets to see your beautiful face except me right now.

**Marty Makary** (3:00)
Good to see you, Peter.

**Peter Attia** (3:01)
This is a topic you and I have been talking about privately for about two months now.
I think we decided that it was an important enough subject that we should actually bring it to the larger sphere and talk about this publicly. And that's the issue of patient safety, something that's near and dear to your heart. You've worked on this tirelessly for almost as long as I've known you. And I think we met in 2003, 2002 actually we met.

**Marty Makary** (3:26)
Yeah.

**Peter Attia** (3:26)
And this has been something that you, along with many of your colleagues, people who I knew like Peter Pronovost have also taken up the mantle on. And you know, when I think back to my medical training, Marty, when I think of the beginning versus the end, that's a five year stint. A lot of changes actually happened. Something as simple, quite frankly, as a timeout was not something that existed before I entered my residency. So when I was an intern, there was no such thing as a timeout, a surgical timeout in the operating room. We can explain what that means to people. Yet by the time I left my residency, you couldn't do an operation without a timeout.