Yesterday, we had the treat of hosting Dr. Kelley Skeff for our 7th Research and Innovation in Medical Education Week at UAB. He gave a brilliant Grand Rounds that I hope everyone will get a chance to hear. He talked about the Joy of Medicine and the threats to that Joy.
Readers of this blog would find much of his talk familiar. Of course he told the story extremely well.
He focused on why we should be joyful in medicine, and then proceeded to talk about the artificial barriers to our joy. He made us think.
Kelley has dedicated his career to teaching medicine and teaching the teachers how to teach better. I am one of his proteges.
One great expertise he has involves taping educational interactions and showing us what is going wrong and how we can improve.
He highlighted his recent passion, the chronology of present illness. He opined that too many presentations ramble and confuse. Poor presentations can obfuscate the patient’s problems. He argues for presentations that are more clear and start at the beginning, not yesterday only.
He talk about the problems in practice and particular in medical education. He shared insights from several authors, two of whom I would like to highlight.
First he referred to Daniel Pink’s important book Drive. Here is what I wrote while reading the book – What @danielpink teaches us about medicine
Then he mentioned an author of whom I was unfamiliar Simon Sinek. So today I found his great TeD Talk Start with why — how great leaders inspire action
If we agree on why, then success happens more easily. If your institution makes clear that patient care and educating future physicians is why we exist, then that institution will breed great clinicians and clinician educators. If your institution focuses on How and What while ignoring Why, then the institution will breed burnout and unhappiness too often.
Let’s decipher this in the context of our current health care atmosphere. When we mostly hear about “throughput (length of stay)” and “performance measures” and “satisfaction scores” and writing our notes so that we can maximize billing, the why seems ignored.
Most physicians enter medical school because of the why. We want to help patients. So much other stuff seems to interfere with achieving the why. We need our institutions and leaders to return to the why.
As physicians it is our job to emphasize the why. Kelley understands and is making this a mission. I believe my colleagues at UAB in general internal medicine will do our best to help Kelley succeed in that mission. Our patients deserve physicians who focus on them rather than the chart.
