Winter Articles and Videos worth reading and watching
It has been pouring and gray here in Seattle. This is the type of weather that makes me want to have tea by the fire with something interesting to read or something fun to watch.
I recently discussed the concept of work life integration. This is the idea that who you are is based on four components: your work, your family, your community, and your personal self. Thus, success and happiness occur when you can integrate these parts of your life rather than keeping everything in separate buckets. Today, I am going to share a couple of veterinary articles but also some videos and winter articles I came across through other networks.
Winter Articles and Videos on Gender
The Riveter is an organization started in Seattle that runs flexible co-working office spaces around the country. The group has a great newsletter specifically targeted for working women. I really liked this interview with Danielle Shoots on leadership tools for women. Shoots, who was named one of Colorado’s top 25 most powerful women in business for 2019, is Vice President and CFO for The Colorado Trust, and CEO of the daily BOSS UP. She has had an interesting journey from teen mom at 16 to one of the youngest CFO’s in Denver at 26. One of my favorite quotes from the interview:
“Being a mom is being the greatest executive on the planet. Because your job as an executive is to care about people whose lives and careers are in your hands. It’s to grow them. It’s to make them better.”
In a recent blog, I discussed a recent ethnographic study which revealed the large role gender is playing in the veterinary profession. The study discussed instances where women were not offered promotions or management positions based on assumptions about women’s desires and roles related to their families.
In my opinion, gender assumptions and judgments are often unconscious and reflect implicit bias rather than purposeful discrimination. PBS has a great series of two minute videos that do an excellent job of explaining implicit bias. This one was my favorite and definitely worth 2 minutes of your time.
Patient Safety
I have not published much on the blog recently about patient safety. Dr. Dan Fletcher from Cornell University and I were recently interviewed for a DVM360 article on medical errors.
I also wrote a piece for pet owners, Protect your Pet from Medication Errors, on the VETzInsight blog.
Do Hospital Mergers impact quality of care
In a previous blog, I discussed some of the research looking at healthcare costs and healthcare quality after mergers. A new study looking at quality after hospital mergers and acquisitions was just published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. The authors compared four different quality metrics between 246 hospitals that were acquired and 1986 control hospitals. They found a decline in patient experience in the acquired hospitals and no change in mortality or readmission rate. In this study, the decline in patient experience worsened over a period of 4 years after acquisition.
Winter articles on burnout
Veterinarians have a tough job and well being is a huge issue for the profession. The Merck Animal Health Survey of 3500 veterinarians reported that 1 in 20 veterinarians suffers from serious psychologist distress. Depression, burnout, and anxiety top the list of problems. Luckily, more resources and time are being directed toward this important issue.
However, I worry that when we focus only on resilience and wellbeing, we avoid talking about the systemic issues that exist in our profession. I really like this article by Nisha Mehta, MD, a human radiologist and the way she uses different fractures to explain why resilience is not enough to combat physician burnout. I believe her comments are directly relevant to veterinarians and changes in our profession.
For Atul Gawande Groupies
I’ve read all of Atul Gawande’s books and most of his articles in The New Yorker. I appreciate his thoughtful ideas about how to improve medical care and how to be a better doctor. One interesting idea he has promoted is coaching for improvement in healthcare. If you have 17 minutes, this is a really interesting TED Talk.
Happy Reading and Watching!
