I want to share a cool idea used at Mission Health in North Carolina. I recently interviewed Dr. Ron Paulus, CEO of the health system. Three years ago the organization launched “Immersion Day,” when board members leave their corporate meeting rooms to shadow the doctors and nurses in their hospitals.
Journalists and legislators are also invited to join. They don scrubs, go through an orientation, sign privacy forms, and spend 9 to 12 hours behind the scenes watching frontline clinicians in their everyday work. They gain insights they could never have gained otherwise.
According to Dr. Paulus, Immersion Day helps each side learn how the other thinks. For many board members, it’s the first time they’ve been on the front lines of care. For many physicians, it’s the first time they’ve met a member of the board. (The health system has a second program, appropriately named “Walk a Mile,” for senior executives.)
The experience, which has been repeated several times since its inception, has catalyzed better understanding and positive change. One board member was quoted in an article about the initiative as saying, “I learned more about hospitals and health care from my ten immersion hours than six years sitting on our board.”
Dr. Paulus told me that after seeing the stress level of doctors and nurses and the frustrations they dealt with every day, the board unanimously agreed to a multimillion-dollar program to improve the usability of the electronic health record and fix inefficient and frustrating workflow processes. They also approved funding for additional behavioral health services in the ED, for which the need was evident during their shadowing experience.
How can this idea help prevent burnout? Initiatives like Immersion Day can bridge the gap that exists in many organizations between the daily world of the care providers and the board members, executives, and legislators who make decisions that profoundly affect that world. As Dr. Paulus told me, “It’s easy to disrespect someone you don’t know and have stereotyped. A key solution is to have people spend time together and listen to each other long enough to avoid discounting and stereotyping.”
When administrators and board members can see the downstream, longer term effects of their decisions about resources, staffing, performance metrics, organizational priorities, and work policies, they can begin to appreciate what research in other industries has already shown: valuing employees, through improving their work experience and other means, makes good business sense and results in better overall performance. And it’s the right thing to do.
Diane W. Shannon is a physician, professional coach, author, and health care writer who helps women physicians build influential, sustainable careers without sacrificing their well-being. She can be found at dianeshannon.com.
She brings more than 20 years of expertise in physician burnout, women physician leadership, and building sustainable physician workplaces. After experiencing burnout early in her own primary care career, she dedicated her work to understanding why talented physicians struggle and what it takes for both individuals and organizations to thrive. Drawing on her experience as both a physician and award-winning health care writer, she helps women physicians expand their leadership, navigate career transitions, and avoid burnout, while partnering with health care organizations to retain physicians, develop women leaders, and strengthen workplace culture.
Dr. Shannon is coauthor of Preventing Physician Burnout: Curing the Chaos and Returning Joy to the Practice of Medicine, a TEDx speaker, and cofounder of Lead Your Way Academy. Her writing on burnout, cognitive load, and physician well-being has appeared in Massachusetts Medical Society publications, the American Medical Association’s STEPS Forward toolkit series, and on WBUR. She shares updates on LinkedIn and Instagram.
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