When I transitioned into a new role as a training faculty member at an academic medical center a few years ago, it didn’t take long to realize that the program had a problem with psychological safety. There wasn’t much. As I got to know the…
Category: Hospital-Based Medicine
Physician secrets that nurses need to know
There is no one prototypical physician. Every physician has their own practice style, their own knowledge base, and their own preferred method of communication. In my role as medical director for case management at my community hospital, I was given 30…
Communication protocols exist for a reason
An excerpt from The Mumbo Jumbo Fix: A Survival Guide for Effective Doctor-Patient-Nurse Communication. Team building is a popular trend in health care. It promotes cooperation, trust and respect, improves communication, and enhances patient outcomes….
All I ever wanted to be was a nurse [PODCAST]
Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Catch up on old episodes! “As a nurse, I know how difficult and demanding the job can be. I’ve had patients try to physically attack me and it’s frustrating and disheartening to face such hostility…
If the hospital CEO emailed employees like Twitter’s CEO
To: [Group: all employees] From: Office of the CEO Subject: A fork in the road Going forward, we will need to be extremely hardcore to streamline a restructured Health care 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly diseased world. This will mean working even …
Bring the real You to your workplace
Life is short, so make yours extraordinary. Capitalize on what makes you, YOU, and be your own unapologetic self. The Almighty designed us as unique but imperfect and flawed individuals, prone to sin and blundering error. But that’s the great par…
Why is collaboration missing in health care?
An essay posted by Fareeha Kahn, MD (“A hospitalist’s struggle to find teamwork in academic medicine“), raises an important issue. The problem of lack of collaboration is not unique to academic medicine. The problem is the result of m…
Why we should end gendered titles
The question of addressing physicians by name has been addressed again. Yet the question about names has not been addressed. Before addressing the name question, I will talk about how I have evolved with time. In India, I have been used to formally add…
Leaving The House of God
To paraphrase Fat Man’s Law Number Three, “At a code, the first pulse you take is your own.” Enduring advice, as true today as it was in the early ’70s when Roy G. Basch, MD, and his gang of hapless interns roamed the airless wa…
Institutional betrayal vs. courage
The pandemic has brutalized health care such that the term “institutional betrayal” (IB) is becoming part of the physician vernacular. This cringe-worthy term is being used to point a finger of shame at health care leaders and systems who p…
