A Surgeon's Heart: The Conflict - Paperback

by R. W. Sewell (Author)

What happens when a physician's duty to his patient collides with the demands of the system paying for that care?

For pediatric heart surgeon Jack Roberts, the answer was once simple: the patient comes first.

But the American healthcare system around him is changing. Hospitals face mounting financial pressures. Insurance companies, government programs, administrators, and reimbursement policies increasingly influence decisions once left to physicians and their patients. To Jack, these aren't abstract arguments about healthcare policy. They affect real people-including critically ill children whose lives may depend upon receiving the right treatment at the right time.

And now the stakes have become personal.

Jack's son David is a brilliant young man determined to follow him into medicine. Jack should be proud. Instead, he finds himself wondering whether the profession that gave his own life purpose will still exist in recognizable form by the time his son enters it.

As Jack's resistance to the changing system grows, professional disagreements become personal battles. His determination to defend physician autonomy and the doctor-patient relationship places him in conflict with increasingly powerful interests-and forces him to decide how much he is willing to risk for the principles he has spent a lifetime defending.

Meanwhile, events beyond the United States continue expanding Jack's understanding of healthcare itself. The contrast between a wealthy nation struggling with the cost and control of medicine and people elsewhere struggling simply to obtain it forces uncomfortable questions for which neither politics nor economics provides an easy answer.

The Conflict is the second novel in the six-book A Surgeon's Heart series, a multigenerational medical family saga about physicians, patients, family, faith, and the transformation of American healthcare.

Written by a surgeon with more than forty years of experience caring for patients, the series takes readers behind the public debate over healthcare and places them where its consequences are ultimately felt: between a doctor and the person who needs care.

Jack Roberts answered The Calling.

Now he must face The Conflict.

Author Biography

Robert Walter Sewell was born on November 20, 1950, in Independence, Missouri, and moved to Texas with his parents at the age of twelve. He has lived in Texas since, attending Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur and Lamar University in Beaumont, where he received a bachelor's degree in biology. He went on to the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, where he achieved his medical degree in 1974. He was accepted into the general surgery residency program at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio and completed his surgical training in 1979. After finishing his residency, Dr. Sewell immediately began his surgical practice in the Mid-Cities of North Texas, then moved his practice to its current location in Southlake, Texas, in 2003. He remains an active surgeon today, with an emphasis on minimally invasive general surgery at the Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Southlake. As a recognized specialist in the field of laparoscopic surgery, Dr. Sewell has lectured on various minimally invasive procedures throughout the United States and around the world. He is a member of the American Society of General Surgeons (ASGS) and was elected president of that organization in February 2008. He is also a fellow of the American College of Surgeons (FACS) and has served as a governor since 2013. Dr. Sewell maintains memberships in the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, the Texas Medical Association, the Tarrant County Medical Society, as well as the prestigious Texas Surgical Society. Along with his wife, Donna, Dr. Sewell resides in Colleyville, Texas, a suburb of Fort Worth, where he enjoys golf, photography, computer graphics, video production, gardening and, of course, writing.