Medical mistakes are as old as the practice of medicine itself, but it wasn’t until 1999 that the United States started paying more attention to them. Over twenty years later, we may be reducing medical errors — a recent study published in the Jo…
Category: Hospital-Based Medicine
People behaving badly: 4 steps to de-escalate hostile people
Imagine that you are a brand-new attending in a hospital. You have your new starched white coat and stethoscope around your neck. Before you enter your patient’s room, the nurse says, “Whew! Good luck! The patient’s dad is really angr…
He was more than a housekeeper
Over 30 years ago, this man began working for our hospital system. He was assigned to our ICU/CVICU units. Though some health care employees hadn’t even been born yet, Charles was a tried and true “lifer.” He was our housekeeper. And …
Top 10 things new interns should do
New resident physicians who have earned their MD degrees will be heading to hospitals to start their residencies during the last two week in June and the first week in July. What can a beginning doctor do during the first month of internship to get his…
What is the narrative that you hear when faced with uncertainty?
The first week of my big attending job, I saw a patient with fever, sore throat, no cough, and tonsillar exudates. Well-trained to manage septic shock, but having no idea how to practice in a primary care clinic, I crafted a vast array of infectious an…
To admit or not to admit
Imagine that you hired a teenager to sell hotdogs at the local fair, but the teenager started telling customers that hotdogs were really not very healthy, that the price was ridiculously high, and that they could find healthier, cheaper options just ar…
5 reasons physicians are afraid to leave medicine
At age 33, I got my first job as an outpatient pediatric attending. With great pay, nice coworkers, and exceedingly better hours than in training, to everyone around me, I had finally “landed.” Soon after I began working, however, I woke up…
Delivering unpalatable truths in medicine
Many providers enter medicine to comfort patients and their loved ones. However, much of what I do doesn’t live up to that intention. In the past few months and particularly the past few weeks, I’ve spent most of my afternoons making little…
Patient care is not a spectator sport [PODCAST]
“Whether led by the patient or by a primary care physician or nurse practitioner, a proper leadership-based problem-solving methodology is a critical tool. The approach itself is not nearly as important as the discipline to use a formal approach….
A call to stop overworking
After being a coach for a couple of years now, there is an immediate danger I see right now. Many of you are doing too much. Unsustainable, dangerous amounts of work. Dangerous to yourself and dangerous to others, which makes it dangerous for you, too….
