Sam Kean Quotes

Our interaction as patients with the NHS should be on the basis that there's a presumption that all information is shared with us.

I advocate for a totally new view of the role of the patient: patient as engaged partner, not passive recipient.

There's a culture inside the NHS that is highly paternalistic. You know, 'We give them the service and they are grateful.' We have to move to shared decision-making.

I am here on behalf of all the patients that I have ever met, all the ones I haven't met. This is about letting patients play a more active role ... in fixing health care.

Patients have the right to help themselves.

I'm an e-patient: equipped, enabled, empowered, engaged. I'm no clinician, but I do everything in my power to help them, to play an active role in my own care, and even in the design of care.

Have a hand in your own treatment. I have nothing but praise for our doctors, but I think they could help us better, and we can help them if we work together.

Value in medicine depends on information - as I said in 'Let Patients Help,' 'People perform better when they're informed better.' It follows that to make patients and families more effective in care, they need to know more.

We will empower patients as well as health professionals. We will disempower the hierarchy and bureaucracy.

We would like doctors to listen, but the fact is, we better be ready to be able to talk to them. You're going to have to be an active participant in that conversation, so I'd say the American people are going to need ways of stepping up to the conversation.

Please, let patients help improve healthcare. Let patients help steer our decisions, strategic and practical. Let patients help define what value in medicine is.

One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is that assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind.

The consumer is really underutilized in health care.

I want to be clear: not all patient communities are great, any more than online communities of any sort. But when a good one gets going, boy is it sweet.

We tend not to use the biggest resource in healthcare - the patients themselves. So I'm trying to figure out possible uses for digital technologies like Facebook but also real-life social networks to improve healthcare provision.

My job as a physician is to make sure I have provided my patients with the best options to make the decisions that affect their lives.

If doctors just spent more time with their patients so they felt more reassured, that might help.

As a clinician, I would never want to be coercive in relation to a patient, nor do I harbor the illusion that as a physician I am capable of forcing someone to change their behavior, no matter how detrimental to their health.

When I opened my solo practice, I made it a priority to put my patients' experience first and foremost. This involves making them feel comfortable, both literally and figuratively.

I'm opposed to anybody getting between me and the patient.

The patient is the nucleus of the health care system.

Doctors are human; they make mistakes, and you have to stay on top of them. You have to ask the second question, the third question, the follow-up to the fourth question.

A modern health and social care system has to be completely focussed on the needs of its users.

Fundamentally, the answers to our challenges in healthcare relies in engaging and empowering the individual.

In the first speech I delivered as health secretary, I made one thing perfectly clear: we need a cultural shift in the NHS: from a culture responsive mainly to orders from the top down to one responsive to patients, in which patient safety is put first.