Healthcare workers' expectations of excellence are perhaps not sufficiently part of modern medicine. A recent report by the Institute of Medicine tells us more than we wanted to know about our performance. As healthcare costs more and the budgets contract, there has emerged a philosophy of the reversed Field of Dreams. If we don't build it, they won't come. Maybe they are right, but it numbs the soul and loses sight of excellence.
Excellence creates hope.
It's why people who are sick come for care. Each of us hopes that our physician or nurse will see us as a person for whom the individual quality of life is the paramount goal. This is the quality of medicine, the rationale. North Dakota's experience teaches us about hope and the role of science as a tool. You can build a good hospital from the ruins of the river, if you have the right people and if you expect the quality your own family deserves.