The Weight of a Human Heart: Lessons From the Operating Room

How do heart surgeons live with the consequences of decisions that can change a human life, and what can we learn from them?
About this Event

A heart surgeon rarely gets to choose between risk and no risk. More often, they are choosing between one risk and another, knowing that another person’s life sits inside that decision. The data can tell them what tends to happen across thousands of patients, but it can never tell them exactly what will happen to the person on the table.

We will follow some of the operations heart surgeons perform most often, from the decision to operate to what happens when a case does not go as planned. We will look at the emotional weight of being responsible for an outcome that may change a patient’s life, the difficult conversations that follow, and what it takes to return to the operating room and do it again.

Finally, we will look at what we can borrow from heart surgeons. Their work depends on habits designed to make the next surgery safer, and those habits can give us a useful way to think about judgment in our own lives, especially when we have to make consequential decisions without complete information. We will also get an inside look at current efforts to build equity and broaden the pipeline into cardiac surgery, and what is on the horizon for the field.

Dr. Bobby Yanagawa is Division Head of Cardiac Surgery at St. Michael’s Hospital and Program Director and Associate Professor in the Division of Cardiac Surgery at the University of Toronto. His clinical and research work focuses on surgical revascularization, valvular heart disease and cardiac surgical outcomes. He also directs the National Cardiac Surgery Residency Training Bootcamp and has led work to broaden access to the profession, including co-founding St. Michael’s Next Surgeon program.

Agenda

6:00 PM doors open. Guests are welcome to arrive early, order drinks, and have dinner before the lecture begins.

7:00 PM lecture begins, followed by Q&A.

8:15 PM wrap up. Guests are welcome to stay for conversation and another drink.