On the afternoon Hao-Hua Wu, MD, a spine surgeon at the University of California, Irvine, spoke with Becker’s, an urgent case was already testing one of his central beliefs about medicine: The operation is only part of the job.
Before he could get to the technical work, Dr. Wu had to secure operating room time, align anesthesia and neuromonitoring, make sure the right trainees and equipment were in place, and speak with the patient and family.
The surgery itself still mattered most. But Dr. Wu’s point is that even a technically perfect operation can be undermined if everything around it is poorly led…