Each year The BBC Reith Lectures, named after its first Director General, Lord Reith, gives a selected great thinker of this age the opportunity to deliver a series of lectures that are broadcast across BBC outlets worldwide. This year’s lecturer is the medical doctor and writer Dr Atul Gawande.

Dr. Gawande is a practicing surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Professor at both the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School in the USA. He’s well known for his writing on medicine, and for his research on medical error and performance.

In the second lecture Dr. Gawande focuses on the impact that the development of systems has had – and should have in the future – on medicine and on overcoming failures of ineptitude. He dissects systems of all kinds, from simple checklists to complex mechanisms of many parts. And he argues for how they can be better designed to transform care from the richest parts of the world to the poorest.

Recorded at the Wellcome Collection in London, UK

Broadcast window: December 2 – 8 December

Broadcast times: Tuesday, December 1 0206-0259 and repeated on Saturday, December 5 at 1706-1759 EST

Program duration: 49 minutes (23 minutes & 26 minutes 30 seconds) or 30 minutes including News bulletin, billboard & promo)

Number of episodes: 2 of 4