A guest column by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, exclusive to KevinMD.
The refrigerated trucks had not yet left our parking lot when I got an email from the IT department. It was late spring 2020, and deploying a new electronic health record system for the anesthesia department was not front of mind. We …
Prioritizing patient safety during a global pandemic
In health care circles these days, you hear about the social determinants of health (SDOH) almost as often as you hear: “You’re on mute!” SDOH are the conditions in the places where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect health outcomes. These non-medical factors like income, socioeconomic status and access to health care, safe housing, and reliable transportation drive …
Coding for social determinants of health and unmet social needs
I describe work-life balance not as a see-saw with one side going up while the other goes down, but more like a wobble board with imbalance possibilities in infinite directions.
Now that I’m in my fifties with grown kids, I feel compelled to share what I think I did right — and on what I feel I wasted time/energy with the disclaimer that it all depends on your values and this …
Work-life balance is not an accident
“If you knew we are like the ‘Two Fridas,’
that our hearts are connected,
would you change your mind?
Would you stop
as you are about to cut
the artery feeding your heart and mine?
If you knew that when you cry because of your loneliness,
because of your longing for your family,
that I cry, too, …
Unrequited: love in the time of COVID-19 [PODCAST]
We are nurses. We are in highly dangerous and volatile units at hospitals. We are not working in a prison. We work in behavioral health. The intensive management unit, the adolescent unit, the dual-diagnosis unit, and the behavioral health emergency department.
We are specially trained to protect ourselves and others with CPI — a mandatory nonviolent crisis intervention training. We have patients who are schizophrenic, bipolar, drug addicts, with assault charges, …
We are behavioral health nurses and we want to thank our public safety officers (PSOs)
I almost quit my job in 2014. I didn’t like my life, and I didn’t like myself. I had a lot of problems personally and professionally, and I wondered if I was good enough to solve them. I often felt weak and powerless. People were coming to me for answers, but I sometimes felt like a fraud.
My usual strategies of working harder and reading more books weren’t helping me, and …
A burnout coach saved my medical career — and possibly my life
When you are trapped in a locker room in only your underwear at 3 a.m., you realize how many things must have gone wrong for you to land in that spot. Within the first week of my clinical rotations, I managed to be bested by the scrub machine. It was a strong start, to say the least.
My name is Ed, and I am writing to you as a fourth-year medical …
New medical students: Do not take yourself too seriously
Very few are talking about workplace bullying, yet many are benefitting from it. It acts contrary to the principles of care at the heart of medicine — and we need to do something about it.
How many physicians have wanted to leave medicine because they were subject to horizontal violence or bullying in the workplace? Who has felt undermined, belittled or humiliated when showing up to work on a daily or …
Let’s talk about bullying in medicine
Almost ten years ago, there was a knock at the door. My children and I were playing games as it was only a few days after Christmas. All of us answered the door, and there stood a sheriff with papers. He said those dreaded words, “you are served.” As I closed the door, I tried to hold back my tears and get my kids situated in front of the TV. …
Avoiding medical malpractice in the wake of the pandemic
“For the most highly educated and specialized professional on the health care totem pole, physicians put up with a ridiculous amount of nonsense in the workplace.
You are pressured to see high volumes of patients in a rapid-fire fashion (15 minutes per visit) even when it interferes with the quality of …
Why do physicians stay in toxic work environments? [PODCAST]
For most of my life, I was so busy cramming and training to focus on my nasal profile or my pesky protruding lower left canine. The drive to achieve academically consumed me from a very young age. I staved off self-doubt through study, intense repetition until the knowledge bled from my brain onto the pages of countless exams. For eleven years, I missed birthdays, family gatherings and sacrificed friendships and …
One surgeon’s decision during COVID to finally believe in her long-term survival
I have deep roots in the Benedictine tradition at St. John’s University, MN. I took my first steps in Guild Hall, graduated from St. John’s Prep School and University, and later married my wife Ashley at The Abbey church. My understanding of the biopsychosocial and spiritual aspects of the human condition grew from these formative years at St. John’s and inspired me to become a physician and leader. I’m grateful …
From the ground up: an invitation for self-care for physicians and health care professionals
As a hospice and palliative care physician, grief is a familiar concept to me. It is most often discussed in the context of loss of life. However, grief at the root is simply profound and agonizing distress caused by loss — any loss. In hospice and palliative care, we train to recognize risk factors for complicated grief and to refer for early intervention. The pandemic has been the ideal breeding …
Complicated grief: the hidden pandemic in health care workers
“Unfortunately, when negotiating with hospitals I am frequently forced to deal with individuals who need to ‘explain’ the importance of maintaining flexibility in their workforce (a wonderful business school phrase that appropriately dehumanizes the people who are accomplishing the purported mission of the hospital to treat the sick and …
Are hospitals evil? A physician contract lawyer explains. [PODCAST]
More than one in three U.S. physicians will face a medical malpractice lawsuit in their careers. As the role of advanced practice clinicians such as nurse practitioners as primary caregivers continues to grow, so too will their exposure to medical malpractice litigation. Therefore, health care providers may benefit from staying versed in the following key shifts in medical malpractice litigation:
1. Demographic shifts change courtroom dynamics. Read more…
Tackling trial delays, social inflation, and skeptical jurors in a pandemic world
Over the past few decades, we have seen a huge swing in our patients’ perceived quality of health care. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, individualism in health care has been taken to an extreme. Because of misinformation from non-medical sources, autonomy, which was expected to lead to a more medically educated public, has instead resulted in widespread mistrust of the medical establishment. With that, many if not all …
Ubuntu philosophy in health care
“You were doing it wrong.”
The patient in my pulmonary clinic for follow-up after her discharge from a hospitalization in January of this year for COVID-19 pneumonia was explaining why she would not reconsider getting vaccinated despite her recent illness.
I told her I had been seeing people die from this disease for the last two years; I wanted to prevent others from suffering from severe illness and death—like her.
“People were dying …
What’s wrong? Patients use disinformation to blame doctors.
“I thought of her with each miscarriage I saw in COVID+ mothers, and during each delivery of premature rupture of membranes due to infection. I thought of her every time I gave steroids, increased the oxygen flow for someone struggling to breathe, or held the hand of someone before their …
COVID and obstetrics: a physician shares her story [PODCAST]
A recent conversation with a colleague took an unfortunate turn when he asked me to teach him how to say my name. I happily obliged. “It’s O-HA-BUN-WA” I said phonetically with a smile on my face. Like many with ethnically distinct names, I get so happy when people attempt to say my name correctly. His response, however, was quite shocking.
“I will never be able to pronounce that,” he said emphatically. …
Combat name-based microaggressions with these commitments today
The world is constantly trying to keep up with the latest COVID-19 variant – from Alpha to Omicron and now Omicron’s cousin BA.2, we have seen how contagious and virulent these variants can be. Viruses are wily adversaries, and they mutate both to avoid detection and to defeat the body’s immune responses from vaccines and previous infections.
Even if vaccines continue to be effective at preventing severe illness and death from …
To treat future COVID variants, we need more than vaccines
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