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No-shows
When a patient fails to show up for his appointment, your reaction may run the gamut from elation to anger or land somewhere on the spectrum between concern and self-doubt. If you are overbooked and running behind with a waiting room that looks like a bus station at rush hour, an unexpectedly unfilled appointment slot can provide a much needed but all too brief respite. However, if the patient who no-shows is someone whom you have been worried about, you may wonder if he has slipped further into a debilitating depression. Or maybe he found a physician that he prefers?
If you keep your finger on the economic pulse of your practice, you know that the empty slot created when a patient no-shows is valuable time that is not generating any income. Your practice administrator may have sent a practice-wide email expressing concern about what she feels is an unacceptably high and economically unsustainable no-show rate. She already may have replaced your antiquated system using postcards and personal phone call reminders with preprogrammed emails and robo-calls.
If despite these high tech targeted reminders your no-show rate continues to be unacceptably high, the problem may be with how and when your office schedules appointments. When a parent or older patient calls with what she feels is an urgent or time-sensitive complaint, is she offered an appointment that satisfies her sense of urgency? She may agree to make an appointment but as soon as she hangs up may begin searching for another source of care and neglect to cancel the appointment with you when she finds a more timely response.
On the other hand, the patient’s problem may have resolved itself. With this in mind, I asked our receptionists to not make next-day appointments for a child with ear pain if for whatever reason the child was unable to come in for a same-day appointment. I knew from experience that ear pain often resolved and appointments weren’t kept or parents would cancel at the last minute. However, we guaranteed that if the child’s pain persisted we would see them immediately in the morning.
You may be muttering to yourself that you can’t possibly give every patient an appointment as soon as they would like to be seen. True. But aren’t there some patients who could be well served by a quick same-day appointment to allay their fear and sketch out a starting point for diagnosis and management at a later visit? A skillful and calming appointment secretary or nurse may be able to provide the same level of reassurance. But sometimes a short office visit is a more effective and efficient way to depressurize the situation and avoid a longer appointment that has a high likelihood of being no-showed or canceled.
Finally, are you or other members of your group in the habit of making follow-up appointments for problems that probably don’t require follow up? Most patients have an excellent sense when a follow-up appointment is unnecessary and are likely to cancel at the last minute or no-show. They may have had more than one experience in which they took off time from work and traveled 20 miles for a 3-minute visit that didn’t seem worth the effort. A quick phone call or two from you or your staff may be a better way to make sure things are going in the right direction and avoid the cost and frustration of a no-show.
The bottom line is that no-shows happen but when appointments are thoughtfully made the patients are more likely to keep them.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
When a patient fails to show up for his appointment, your reaction may run the gamut from elation to anger or land somewhere on the spectrum between concern and self-doubt. If you are overbooked and running behind with a waiting room that looks like a bus station at rush hour, an unexpectedly unfilled appointment slot can provide a much needed but all too brief respite. However, if the patient who no-shows is someone whom you have been worried about, you may wonder if he has slipped further into a debilitating depression. Or maybe he found a physician that he prefers?
If you keep your finger on the economic pulse of your practice, you know that the empty slot created when a patient no-shows is valuable time that is not generating any income. Your practice administrator may have sent a practice-wide email expressing concern about what she feels is an unacceptably high and economically unsustainable no-show rate. She already may have replaced your antiquated system using postcards and personal phone call reminders with preprogrammed emails and robo-calls.
If despite these high tech targeted reminders your no-show rate continues to be unacceptably high, the problem may be with how and when your office schedules appointments. When a parent or older patient calls with what she feels is an urgent or time-sensitive complaint, is she offered an appointment that satisfies her sense of urgency? She may agree to make an appointment but as soon as she hangs up may begin searching for another source of care and neglect to cancel the appointment with you when she finds a more timely response.
On the other hand, the patient’s problem may have resolved itself. With this in mind, I asked our receptionists to not make next-day appointments for a child with ear pain if for whatever reason the child was unable to come in for a same-day appointment. I knew from experience that ear pain often resolved and appointments weren’t kept or parents would cancel at the last minute. However, we guaranteed that if the child’s pain persisted we would see them immediately in the morning.
You may be muttering to yourself that you can’t possibly give every patient an appointment as soon as they would like to be seen. True. But aren’t there some patients who could be well served by a quick same-day appointment to allay their fear and sketch out a starting point for diagnosis and management at a later visit? A skillful and calming appointment secretary or nurse may be able to provide the same level of reassurance. But sometimes a short office visit is a more effective and efficient way to depressurize the situation and avoid a longer appointment that has a high likelihood of being no-showed or canceled.
Finally, are you or other members of your group in the habit of making follow-up appointments for problems that probably don’t require follow up? Most patients have an excellent sense when a follow-up appointment is unnecessary and are likely to cancel at the last minute or no-show. They may have had more than one experience in which they took off time from work and traveled 20 miles for a 3-minute visit that didn’t seem worth the effort. A quick phone call or two from you or your staff may be a better way to make sure things are going in the right direction and avoid the cost and frustration of a no-show.
The bottom line is that no-shows happen but when appointments are thoughtfully made the patients are more likely to keep them.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
When a patient fails to show up for his appointment, your reaction may run the gamut from elation to anger or land somewhere on the spectrum between concern and self-doubt. If you are overbooked and running behind with a waiting room that looks like a bus station at rush hour, an unexpectedly unfilled appointment slot can provide a much needed but all too brief respite. However, if the patient who no-shows is someone whom you have been worried about, you may wonder if he has slipped further into a debilitating depression. Or maybe he found a physician that he prefers?
If you keep your finger on the economic pulse of your practice, you know that the empty slot created when a patient no-shows is valuable time that is not generating any income. Your practice administrator may have sent a practice-wide email expressing concern about what she feels is an unacceptably high and economically unsustainable no-show rate. She already may have replaced your antiquated system using postcards and personal phone call reminders with preprogrammed emails and robo-calls.
If despite these high tech targeted reminders your no-show rate continues to be unacceptably high, the problem may be with how and when your office schedules appointments. When a parent or older patient calls with what she feels is an urgent or time-sensitive complaint, is she offered an appointment that satisfies her sense of urgency? She may agree to make an appointment but as soon as she hangs up may begin searching for another source of care and neglect to cancel the appointment with you when she finds a more timely response.
On the other hand, the patient’s problem may have resolved itself. With this in mind, I asked our receptionists to not make next-day appointments for a child with ear pain if for whatever reason the child was unable to come in for a same-day appointment. I knew from experience that ear pain often resolved and appointments weren’t kept or parents would cancel at the last minute. However, we guaranteed that if the child’s pain persisted we would see them immediately in the morning.
You may be muttering to yourself that you can’t possibly give every patient an appointment as soon as they would like to be seen. True. But aren’t there some patients who could be well served by a quick same-day appointment to allay their fear and sketch out a starting point for diagnosis and management at a later visit? A skillful and calming appointment secretary or nurse may be able to provide the same level of reassurance. But sometimes a short office visit is a more effective and efficient way to depressurize the situation and avoid a longer appointment that has a high likelihood of being no-showed or canceled.
Finally, are you or other members of your group in the habit of making follow-up appointments for problems that probably don’t require follow up? Most patients have an excellent sense when a follow-up appointment is unnecessary and are likely to cancel at the last minute or no-show. They may have had more than one experience in which they took off time from work and traveled 20 miles for a 3-minute visit that didn’t seem worth the effort. A quick phone call or two from you or your staff may be a better way to make sure things are going in the right direction and avoid the cost and frustration of a no-show.
The bottom line is that no-shows happen but when appointments are thoughtfully made the patients are more likely to keep them.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
Mixin’ it up
What percentage of your office visits are a response to an acute complaint? What percentage are prescheduled well-child visits? And how many are follow-ups to manage chronic conditions and behavioral problems?
You probably have a sense of how you are spending your time in the office, but do you really have the numbers to support your guesstimate of the patient mix? Does anyone in your organization have that data? You probably could come up with some numbers in a few hours with a pencil and your office schedule for the last 2 months. However, learning how much of your income is generated by each category of visit would be more difficult.
Before you run out to the front desk and ask the receptionist to delete your same-day slots and replace them with a few preventive and chronic care visits, we should question a few of Mr. Hart’s assertions.
Of course, like you, I never spent the time to learn which categories of office visit were driving my income. However, I do know that I saw a stimulating mix of acute and chronic visits, and the most important number, the bottom line, was more than adequate for my needs. To achieve this profitable balance of visits meant that I needed to be as efficient as the patients’ complaints would allow. There is an often-repeated myth that there is a direct correlation between the length of time a physician spends with the patient and the quality of the visit. In my experience, patients are more impressed by the physician’s level of attention and concern than the amount of time he spends in the exam room.
You might argue that you just don’t have the time to fit in all those acute visits. But have you had the courage to open up your schedule, maybe hire more staff, and give it a try? It takes a bit of shift in mindset and the acknowledgment that a large part of what we call preventive care has not proved effective. Immunizations? Yes, but the rest, not so much.
I know this is a heretical proposition but I found that I knew my patients better after seeing them when they were in need rather than in the less frequent but longer encounters of a health maintenance visit. It takes work, but there is room for both kinds of visit.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
What percentage of your office visits are a response to an acute complaint? What percentage are prescheduled well-child visits? And how many are follow-ups to manage chronic conditions and behavioral problems?
You probably have a sense of how you are spending your time in the office, but do you really have the numbers to support your guesstimate of the patient mix? Does anyone in your organization have that data? You probably could come up with some numbers in a few hours with a pencil and your office schedule for the last 2 months. However, learning how much of your income is generated by each category of visit would be more difficult.
Before you run out to the front desk and ask the receptionist to delete your same-day slots and replace them with a few preventive and chronic care visits, we should question a few of Mr. Hart’s assertions.
Of course, like you, I never spent the time to learn which categories of office visit were driving my income. However, I do know that I saw a stimulating mix of acute and chronic visits, and the most important number, the bottom line, was more than adequate for my needs. To achieve this profitable balance of visits meant that I needed to be as efficient as the patients’ complaints would allow. There is an often-repeated myth that there is a direct correlation between the length of time a physician spends with the patient and the quality of the visit. In my experience, patients are more impressed by the physician’s level of attention and concern than the amount of time he spends in the exam room.
You might argue that you just don’t have the time to fit in all those acute visits. But have you had the courage to open up your schedule, maybe hire more staff, and give it a try? It takes a bit of shift in mindset and the acknowledgment that a large part of what we call preventive care has not proved effective. Immunizations? Yes, but the rest, not so much.
I know this is a heretical proposition but I found that I knew my patients better after seeing them when they were in need rather than in the less frequent but longer encounters of a health maintenance visit. It takes work, but there is room for both kinds of visit.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
What percentage of your office visits are a response to an acute complaint? What percentage are prescheduled well-child visits? And how many are follow-ups to manage chronic conditions and behavioral problems?
You probably have a sense of how you are spending your time in the office, but do you really have the numbers to support your guesstimate of the patient mix? Does anyone in your organization have that data? You probably could come up with some numbers in a few hours with a pencil and your office schedule for the last 2 months. However, learning how much of your income is generated by each category of visit would be more difficult.
Before you run out to the front desk and ask the receptionist to delete your same-day slots and replace them with a few preventive and chronic care visits, we should question a few of Mr. Hart’s assertions.
Of course, like you, I never spent the time to learn which categories of office visit were driving my income. However, I do know that I saw a stimulating mix of acute and chronic visits, and the most important number, the bottom line, was more than adequate for my needs. To achieve this profitable balance of visits meant that I needed to be as efficient as the patients’ complaints would allow. There is an often-repeated myth that there is a direct correlation between the length of time a physician spends with the patient and the quality of the visit. In my experience, patients are more impressed by the physician’s level of attention and concern than the amount of time he spends in the exam room.
You might argue that you just don’t have the time to fit in all those acute visits. But have you had the courage to open up your schedule, maybe hire more staff, and give it a try? It takes a bit of shift in mindset and the acknowledgment that a large part of what we call preventive care has not proved effective. Immunizations? Yes, but the rest, not so much.
I know this is a heretical proposition but I found that I knew my patients better after seeing them when they were in need rather than in the less frequent but longer encounters of a health maintenance visit. It takes work, but there is room for both kinds of visit.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
Time for a facelift?
A few weeks ago I visited my primary care physician in her new office. As the first patient of the day I was immediately ushered into the examining room by a woman I assume was a medical assistant. She didn’t introduce herself, but her name tag read “Marcy” (not her real name). Her demeanor could best be described as cheerless. She efficiently took my vital signs, asked me my height, and weighed me. She ran through the usual list of screening questions without the slightest hint of a smile despite my efforts to gently inject a bit of levity into my answers.
With her work completed, she left me to wait for “the doctor” without a clue about who I was. She knew that I had one beer and one glass of wine each evening, and that I always wore a seatbelt and didn’t have gun. But she hadn’t provided any outward evidence that she cared about the person who had been providing the answers.
There was a welcome lifting of the chill when my former colleague and current physician entered the exam room. After we had done some catching up about our families and before we started talking about my blood pressure I said, “Marcy really needs to lighten up a bit.”
My observation came as no surprise to my doctor. The transition to a new hospital-owned group practice still had some rough edges including the struggle to instill a more customer-friendly culture among the support staff that she had inherited. She thanked me for my unsolicited feedback.
When Marcy returned to administer my “pneumonia shot” she was wearing a smile. And she was more than willing to engage in the kind of banter that may not have much substance, but is the currency that most of us use to ease the tension in potentially uncomfortable situations. Obviously, while I was waiting she had been given a quick course in customer service.
Marcy and the receptionists are the face of that office, and it certainly wasn’t a welcoming or friendly face. No one was rude. On the other hand, no one was trying to treat the patients as they would like to be treated themselves. You could accuse me of being a nit picky curmudgeon. You could ask if the addition of a smiling face or two would have made a difference in the quality of care coming out of that office. It may not have, but it wouldn’t have hurt, and it would be the nice thing to do.
But and take some of the edge off the anger of patients who are unhappy about the care they have been receiving. There is some evidence that hospitalized patients in customer-friendly situations do better. And I bet that patients seen in customer-friendly offices staff get better more quickly.
If you are aware of staff members whose behavior could be more customer friendly, have you said something to them? It can be touchy. You probably aren’t their supervisor. They may not being doing anything wrong. But their failure to make a pleasant and caring first impression may be making your job more difficult.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine, for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
A few weeks ago I visited my primary care physician in her new office. As the first patient of the day I was immediately ushered into the examining room by a woman I assume was a medical assistant. She didn’t introduce herself, but her name tag read “Marcy” (not her real name). Her demeanor could best be described as cheerless. She efficiently took my vital signs, asked me my height, and weighed me. She ran through the usual list of screening questions without the slightest hint of a smile despite my efforts to gently inject a bit of levity into my answers.
With her work completed, she left me to wait for “the doctor” without a clue about who I was. She knew that I had one beer and one glass of wine each evening, and that I always wore a seatbelt and didn’t have gun. But she hadn’t provided any outward evidence that she cared about the person who had been providing the answers.
There was a welcome lifting of the chill when my former colleague and current physician entered the exam room. After we had done some catching up about our families and before we started talking about my blood pressure I said, “Marcy really needs to lighten up a bit.”
My observation came as no surprise to my doctor. The transition to a new hospital-owned group practice still had some rough edges including the struggle to instill a more customer-friendly culture among the support staff that she had inherited. She thanked me for my unsolicited feedback.
When Marcy returned to administer my “pneumonia shot” she was wearing a smile. And she was more than willing to engage in the kind of banter that may not have much substance, but is the currency that most of us use to ease the tension in potentially uncomfortable situations. Obviously, while I was waiting she had been given a quick course in customer service.
Marcy and the receptionists are the face of that office, and it certainly wasn’t a welcoming or friendly face. No one was rude. On the other hand, no one was trying to treat the patients as they would like to be treated themselves. You could accuse me of being a nit picky curmudgeon. You could ask if the addition of a smiling face or two would have made a difference in the quality of care coming out of that office. It may not have, but it wouldn’t have hurt, and it would be the nice thing to do.
But and take some of the edge off the anger of patients who are unhappy about the care they have been receiving. There is some evidence that hospitalized patients in customer-friendly situations do better. And I bet that patients seen in customer-friendly offices staff get better more quickly.
If you are aware of staff members whose behavior could be more customer friendly, have you said something to them? It can be touchy. You probably aren’t their supervisor. They may not being doing anything wrong. But their failure to make a pleasant and caring first impression may be making your job more difficult.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine, for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
A few weeks ago I visited my primary care physician in her new office. As the first patient of the day I was immediately ushered into the examining room by a woman I assume was a medical assistant. She didn’t introduce herself, but her name tag read “Marcy” (not her real name). Her demeanor could best be described as cheerless. She efficiently took my vital signs, asked me my height, and weighed me. She ran through the usual list of screening questions without the slightest hint of a smile despite my efforts to gently inject a bit of levity into my answers.
With her work completed, she left me to wait for “the doctor” without a clue about who I was. She knew that I had one beer and one glass of wine each evening, and that I always wore a seatbelt and didn’t have gun. But she hadn’t provided any outward evidence that she cared about the person who had been providing the answers.
There was a welcome lifting of the chill when my former colleague and current physician entered the exam room. After we had done some catching up about our families and before we started talking about my blood pressure I said, “Marcy really needs to lighten up a bit.”
My observation came as no surprise to my doctor. The transition to a new hospital-owned group practice still had some rough edges including the struggle to instill a more customer-friendly culture among the support staff that she had inherited. She thanked me for my unsolicited feedback.
When Marcy returned to administer my “pneumonia shot” she was wearing a smile. And she was more than willing to engage in the kind of banter that may not have much substance, but is the currency that most of us use to ease the tension in potentially uncomfortable situations. Obviously, while I was waiting she had been given a quick course in customer service.
Marcy and the receptionists are the face of that office, and it certainly wasn’t a welcoming or friendly face. No one was rude. On the other hand, no one was trying to treat the patients as they would like to be treated themselves. You could accuse me of being a nit picky curmudgeon. You could ask if the addition of a smiling face or two would have made a difference in the quality of care coming out of that office. It may not have, but it wouldn’t have hurt, and it would be the nice thing to do.
But and take some of the edge off the anger of patients who are unhappy about the care they have been receiving. There is some evidence that hospitalized patients in customer-friendly situations do better. And I bet that patients seen in customer-friendly offices staff get better more quickly.
If you are aware of staff members whose behavior could be more customer friendly, have you said something to them? It can be touchy. You probably aren’t their supervisor. They may not being doing anything wrong. But their failure to make a pleasant and caring first impression may be making your job more difficult.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine, for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
Distrust
The odds are that you are an employee. In 2016, for the first time ever, fewer than half of physicians in this country owned their own practice. There are numerous explanations for this shift away from independent ownership. But the bottom line is that more physicians are employees than owners (“For the first time, physician practice owners are not the majority,” By Brendan Murphy, AMA Wire, May 31, 2017). The transition to employee status doesn’t always go well.
While an increasing number of physicians are uninterested in or maybe even intimidated by the challenges of practice ownership, they seem to be even less interested in accepting the uncomfortable realities that can be associated with being an employee.
Practice ownership comes with a host of worries including cash flow, staffing, and overhead. On the other hand, an employee has only one critical concern: Can she trust her employer? You may not have considered your relationship with your employer in terms of trust. But I urge you to look at a recent commentary in Clinician Reviews by Randy D. Danielson, PhD, PA, DAAPA, titled, “Do You Trust Your Employer? (2018 Apr;28[4]:6-8). Dr. Danielson relates the experiences of a colleague who complains that the organization for which he worked completely lacked transparency of its goals and failed to provide accurate financial data. This combination of deficiencies prevented “providers from making a positive impact on cost containment.” The colleague added that the organization’s complex compensation formulas did “not account for the vagaries and complexities of health care.”
Do any of these complaints sound familiar to you? Do you share the same lack of trust in your employer that this provider has voiced? The remainder of Dr. Danielson’s commentary is a discussion of the concept of organizational trust and includes this unsurprising observation: “Lack of trust, particularly between management and employers, creates a hostile work environment in which stress levels are high and productivity is reduced.” It makes one wonder how much of the burnout epidemic among physicians and other providers might be the result of organizational distrust.
At what point in your career did you begin to lose trust in your employer? In retrospect, should you have been more diligent in researching its financial history? How did its acquisitions and reorganizations affect its employees? Did they reflect a pattern that is consistent with your philosophy about how and to whom health care should be delivered?
How carefully did you interview the organization’s employees? Did you sense any distrust? This kind of information doesn’t usually seep out in a 1-day visit and meetings with handpicked employees. Did employees feel that there was sufficient transparency? It is likely that they sat on committees. But did those committees have a voice that was heard and acted upon?
If you were going to purchase a practice you would have done hours, days, and weeks of due diligence before signing a purchase and sales agreement. Deciding whether or not to sign a contract with an employer demands an equivalent amount of research and investigation. You already may have discovered that being trapped by a noncompete clause with an organization you don’t trust can put you on the fast track to burnout.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine, for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
The odds are that you are an employee. In 2016, for the first time ever, fewer than half of physicians in this country owned their own practice. There are numerous explanations for this shift away from independent ownership. But the bottom line is that more physicians are employees than owners (“For the first time, physician practice owners are not the majority,” By Brendan Murphy, AMA Wire, May 31, 2017). The transition to employee status doesn’t always go well.
While an increasing number of physicians are uninterested in or maybe even intimidated by the challenges of practice ownership, they seem to be even less interested in accepting the uncomfortable realities that can be associated with being an employee.
Practice ownership comes with a host of worries including cash flow, staffing, and overhead. On the other hand, an employee has only one critical concern: Can she trust her employer? You may not have considered your relationship with your employer in terms of trust. But I urge you to look at a recent commentary in Clinician Reviews by Randy D. Danielson, PhD, PA, DAAPA, titled, “Do You Trust Your Employer? (2018 Apr;28[4]:6-8). Dr. Danielson relates the experiences of a colleague who complains that the organization for which he worked completely lacked transparency of its goals and failed to provide accurate financial data. This combination of deficiencies prevented “providers from making a positive impact on cost containment.” The colleague added that the organization’s complex compensation formulas did “not account for the vagaries and complexities of health care.”
Do any of these complaints sound familiar to you? Do you share the same lack of trust in your employer that this provider has voiced? The remainder of Dr. Danielson’s commentary is a discussion of the concept of organizational trust and includes this unsurprising observation: “Lack of trust, particularly between management and employers, creates a hostile work environment in which stress levels are high and productivity is reduced.” It makes one wonder how much of the burnout epidemic among physicians and other providers might be the result of organizational distrust.
At what point in your career did you begin to lose trust in your employer? In retrospect, should you have been more diligent in researching its financial history? How did its acquisitions and reorganizations affect its employees? Did they reflect a pattern that is consistent with your philosophy about how and to whom health care should be delivered?
How carefully did you interview the organization’s employees? Did you sense any distrust? This kind of information doesn’t usually seep out in a 1-day visit and meetings with handpicked employees. Did employees feel that there was sufficient transparency? It is likely that they sat on committees. But did those committees have a voice that was heard and acted upon?
If you were going to purchase a practice you would have done hours, days, and weeks of due diligence before signing a purchase and sales agreement. Deciding whether or not to sign a contract with an employer demands an equivalent amount of research and investigation. You already may have discovered that being trapped by a noncompete clause with an organization you don’t trust can put you on the fast track to burnout.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine, for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
The odds are that you are an employee. In 2016, for the first time ever, fewer than half of physicians in this country owned their own practice. There are numerous explanations for this shift away from independent ownership. But the bottom line is that more physicians are employees than owners (“For the first time, physician practice owners are not the majority,” By Brendan Murphy, AMA Wire, May 31, 2017). The transition to employee status doesn’t always go well.
While an increasing number of physicians are uninterested in or maybe even intimidated by the challenges of practice ownership, they seem to be even less interested in accepting the uncomfortable realities that can be associated with being an employee.
Practice ownership comes with a host of worries including cash flow, staffing, and overhead. On the other hand, an employee has only one critical concern: Can she trust her employer? You may not have considered your relationship with your employer in terms of trust. But I urge you to look at a recent commentary in Clinician Reviews by Randy D. Danielson, PhD, PA, DAAPA, titled, “Do You Trust Your Employer? (2018 Apr;28[4]:6-8). Dr. Danielson relates the experiences of a colleague who complains that the organization for which he worked completely lacked transparency of its goals and failed to provide accurate financial data. This combination of deficiencies prevented “providers from making a positive impact on cost containment.” The colleague added that the organization’s complex compensation formulas did “not account for the vagaries and complexities of health care.”
Do any of these complaints sound familiar to you? Do you share the same lack of trust in your employer that this provider has voiced? The remainder of Dr. Danielson’s commentary is a discussion of the concept of organizational trust and includes this unsurprising observation: “Lack of trust, particularly between management and employers, creates a hostile work environment in which stress levels are high and productivity is reduced.” It makes one wonder how much of the burnout epidemic among physicians and other providers might be the result of organizational distrust.
At what point in your career did you begin to lose trust in your employer? In retrospect, should you have been more diligent in researching its financial history? How did its acquisitions and reorganizations affect its employees? Did they reflect a pattern that is consistent with your philosophy about how and to whom health care should be delivered?
How carefully did you interview the organization’s employees? Did you sense any distrust? This kind of information doesn’t usually seep out in a 1-day visit and meetings with handpicked employees. Did employees feel that there was sufficient transparency? It is likely that they sat on committees. But did those committees have a voice that was heard and acted upon?
If you were going to purchase a practice you would have done hours, days, and weeks of due diligence before signing a purchase and sales agreement. Deciding whether or not to sign a contract with an employer demands an equivalent amount of research and investigation. You already may have discovered that being trapped by a noncompete clause with an organization you don’t trust can put you on the fast track to burnout.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine, for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
Homework
How do you feel about homework? Do you think your school-age patients are given too much homework? Would they be better off spending their after-school time at home in free play or exploring nonacademic interests? Or, do you feel the school day is too short to adequately cover what a well-educated child needs to know? Doesn’t homework foster good independent work habits and discipline?
Do you have fond memories of doing homework? Are you glad those days of bringing home an hour or 3 of extra work are behind you? Maybe they aren’t behind you. Are you still spending an hour or more getting stuff done at home you didn’t get done in the office?
Primary care pediatrics has never promised its practitioners that they will arrive at home at the end of the workday free of unfinished business. If you have after-hours call responsibilities, there always have been phone calls, decisions to make, and trips to EDs and delivery rooms. Even if you are fortunate enough to not have after-hours call responsibilities, there are certainly evenings when you are nagged by second thoughts and worries about troublesome patients you have seen during the day. Did you make the correct diagnosis or forget to order a critical lab test?
This kind of homework is expected. It’s what you signed up for. But with experience, you learn how to provide better anticipatory guidance that can decrease the number of after-hours calls. You can minimize, but never eliminate, second-guessing by learning to make wiser diagnostic and therapeutic decisions.
However, arriving home with a laptop or notebook loaded with unfinished electronic health records and work-related emails is not what you thought primary care pediatrics was about ... and it didn’t used to be. For the first 35 years of practice, when I saw my last patient, my office work was over. If I wasn’t on call, I could enjoy the entire evening with my family uninterrupted.
But change happens. Coincident with the launch of a new computer system, my workday became an hour longer so that I could complete my electronic office notes before I went home. For some of my colleagues, this unwelcome addition ran more than an hour and a half or 2 hours, and many of them leapt at the practice administrator’s offer to link their home computers with our new office EHR. Buried in what sounded like a good deal to them, I could hear the creaky opening of a Pandora’s box.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine, for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
How do you feel about homework? Do you think your school-age patients are given too much homework? Would they be better off spending their after-school time at home in free play or exploring nonacademic interests? Or, do you feel the school day is too short to adequately cover what a well-educated child needs to know? Doesn’t homework foster good independent work habits and discipline?
Do you have fond memories of doing homework? Are you glad those days of bringing home an hour or 3 of extra work are behind you? Maybe they aren’t behind you. Are you still spending an hour or more getting stuff done at home you didn’t get done in the office?
Primary care pediatrics has never promised its practitioners that they will arrive at home at the end of the workday free of unfinished business. If you have after-hours call responsibilities, there always have been phone calls, decisions to make, and trips to EDs and delivery rooms. Even if you are fortunate enough to not have after-hours call responsibilities, there are certainly evenings when you are nagged by second thoughts and worries about troublesome patients you have seen during the day. Did you make the correct diagnosis or forget to order a critical lab test?
This kind of homework is expected. It’s what you signed up for. But with experience, you learn how to provide better anticipatory guidance that can decrease the number of after-hours calls. You can minimize, but never eliminate, second-guessing by learning to make wiser diagnostic and therapeutic decisions.
However, arriving home with a laptop or notebook loaded with unfinished electronic health records and work-related emails is not what you thought primary care pediatrics was about ... and it didn’t used to be. For the first 35 years of practice, when I saw my last patient, my office work was over. If I wasn’t on call, I could enjoy the entire evening with my family uninterrupted.
But change happens. Coincident with the launch of a new computer system, my workday became an hour longer so that I could complete my electronic office notes before I went home. For some of my colleagues, this unwelcome addition ran more than an hour and a half or 2 hours, and many of them leapt at the practice administrator’s offer to link their home computers with our new office EHR. Buried in what sounded like a good deal to them, I could hear the creaky opening of a Pandora’s box.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine, for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
How do you feel about homework? Do you think your school-age patients are given too much homework? Would they be better off spending their after-school time at home in free play or exploring nonacademic interests? Or, do you feel the school day is too short to adequately cover what a well-educated child needs to know? Doesn’t homework foster good independent work habits and discipline?
Do you have fond memories of doing homework? Are you glad those days of bringing home an hour or 3 of extra work are behind you? Maybe they aren’t behind you. Are you still spending an hour or more getting stuff done at home you didn’t get done in the office?
Primary care pediatrics has never promised its practitioners that they will arrive at home at the end of the workday free of unfinished business. If you have after-hours call responsibilities, there always have been phone calls, decisions to make, and trips to EDs and delivery rooms. Even if you are fortunate enough to not have after-hours call responsibilities, there are certainly evenings when you are nagged by second thoughts and worries about troublesome patients you have seen during the day. Did you make the correct diagnosis or forget to order a critical lab test?
This kind of homework is expected. It’s what you signed up for. But with experience, you learn how to provide better anticipatory guidance that can decrease the number of after-hours calls. You can minimize, but never eliminate, second-guessing by learning to make wiser diagnostic and therapeutic decisions.
However, arriving home with a laptop or notebook loaded with unfinished electronic health records and work-related emails is not what you thought primary care pediatrics was about ... and it didn’t used to be. For the first 35 years of practice, when I saw my last patient, my office work was over. If I wasn’t on call, I could enjoy the entire evening with my family uninterrupted.
But change happens. Coincident with the launch of a new computer system, my workday became an hour longer so that I could complete my electronic office notes before I went home. For some of my colleagues, this unwelcome addition ran more than an hour and a half or 2 hours, and many of them leapt at the practice administrator’s offer to link their home computers with our new office EHR. Buried in what sounded like a good deal to them, I could hear the creaky opening of a Pandora’s box.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine, for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
A creative diversion
Do you have a creative diversion – a hobby for lack of a better word? One frequently hears of physicians who have creative skills not directly related to their professional careers. Furniture-building surgeons, fly-tying orthopedists, pediatrician poets, painting dermatologists ... I have even heard unsubstantiated claims that the traits that encourage individuals to become physicians make it more likely that they will have creative skills. Another one of those left brain/right brain things that probably doesn’t hold water.
If you do have a hobby or have the seed of a creative impulse you think could blossom into a hobby, I bet you wish that you could have an unlimited amount of time to invest in that activity. I am going to argue that this is another example of a situation in which you should be careful what you wish for.
When I was 9 or 10 years old, I bought a small carving of a sandpiper in a gift shop on Cape Cod. I still have it with its chipped bill and yellowed paper label on its driftwood base. That little bird triggered my interest in carving, and with gaps sometimes measured in decades I have been a self-taught bird carver. Some are attempts at realism with burned in feathers that takes weeks to complete. Others are free form painted whimsically, and are created in a few hours. They aren’t for sale, but to keep my inventory in check I distribute them as birthday and hostess gifts.
Ten years ago, after decades of visiting art galleries and grumbling to my wife, “I could do that,” I decided to try my hand at two-dimensional landscape painting. It was a fun challenge, and after a year or 2, I was ready to see what other people thought of my work. The first show that I entered stipulated that all of the entries be for sale. With no intention of parting with my work, I priced mine several orders of magnitude above what I thought they were worth.
One sold, and with that began a 7-year period during which pretty much anything I painted with a maritime theme sold for hundreds of dollars. It was a nice ego trip, but it took me down a dark path in which I began to choose my subjects and style based on what I knew would sell. Creating was no longer something I did for a change of pace. I was now retired, but painting had become my job. I felt burdened by the obligation to paint enough to cover the walls of the restaurant that graciously hung my work.
Luckily, the epiphany that I had sacrificed my creative diversion, which began with that little sandpiper, coincided with the restaurant’s decision to redecorate and the loss of much of my hanging space. I was now free to paint subjects I was interested in, and return to the comfort of carving when I felt the need to create.
If you already have a creative diversion, remember that a large part of its appeal is that it plays counterpoint to your job. Even if you are retired, a hobby provides a change of pace from which we can all benefit.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
Do you have a creative diversion – a hobby for lack of a better word? One frequently hears of physicians who have creative skills not directly related to their professional careers. Furniture-building surgeons, fly-tying orthopedists, pediatrician poets, painting dermatologists ... I have even heard unsubstantiated claims that the traits that encourage individuals to become physicians make it more likely that they will have creative skills. Another one of those left brain/right brain things that probably doesn’t hold water.
If you do have a hobby or have the seed of a creative impulse you think could blossom into a hobby, I bet you wish that you could have an unlimited amount of time to invest in that activity. I am going to argue that this is another example of a situation in which you should be careful what you wish for.
When I was 9 or 10 years old, I bought a small carving of a sandpiper in a gift shop on Cape Cod. I still have it with its chipped bill and yellowed paper label on its driftwood base. That little bird triggered my interest in carving, and with gaps sometimes measured in decades I have been a self-taught bird carver. Some are attempts at realism with burned in feathers that takes weeks to complete. Others are free form painted whimsically, and are created in a few hours. They aren’t for sale, but to keep my inventory in check I distribute them as birthday and hostess gifts.
Ten years ago, after decades of visiting art galleries and grumbling to my wife, “I could do that,” I decided to try my hand at two-dimensional landscape painting. It was a fun challenge, and after a year or 2, I was ready to see what other people thought of my work. The first show that I entered stipulated that all of the entries be for sale. With no intention of parting with my work, I priced mine several orders of magnitude above what I thought they were worth.
One sold, and with that began a 7-year period during which pretty much anything I painted with a maritime theme sold for hundreds of dollars. It was a nice ego trip, but it took me down a dark path in which I began to choose my subjects and style based on what I knew would sell. Creating was no longer something I did for a change of pace. I was now retired, but painting had become my job. I felt burdened by the obligation to paint enough to cover the walls of the restaurant that graciously hung my work.
Luckily, the epiphany that I had sacrificed my creative diversion, which began with that little sandpiper, coincided with the restaurant’s decision to redecorate and the loss of much of my hanging space. I was now free to paint subjects I was interested in, and return to the comfort of carving when I felt the need to create.
If you already have a creative diversion, remember that a large part of its appeal is that it plays counterpoint to your job. Even if you are retired, a hobby provides a change of pace from which we can all benefit.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
Do you have a creative diversion – a hobby for lack of a better word? One frequently hears of physicians who have creative skills not directly related to their professional careers. Furniture-building surgeons, fly-tying orthopedists, pediatrician poets, painting dermatologists ... I have even heard unsubstantiated claims that the traits that encourage individuals to become physicians make it more likely that they will have creative skills. Another one of those left brain/right brain things that probably doesn’t hold water.
If you do have a hobby or have the seed of a creative impulse you think could blossom into a hobby, I bet you wish that you could have an unlimited amount of time to invest in that activity. I am going to argue that this is another example of a situation in which you should be careful what you wish for.
When I was 9 or 10 years old, I bought a small carving of a sandpiper in a gift shop on Cape Cod. I still have it with its chipped bill and yellowed paper label on its driftwood base. That little bird triggered my interest in carving, and with gaps sometimes measured in decades I have been a self-taught bird carver. Some are attempts at realism with burned in feathers that takes weeks to complete. Others are free form painted whimsically, and are created in a few hours. They aren’t for sale, but to keep my inventory in check I distribute them as birthday and hostess gifts.
Ten years ago, after decades of visiting art galleries and grumbling to my wife, “I could do that,” I decided to try my hand at two-dimensional landscape painting. It was a fun challenge, and after a year or 2, I was ready to see what other people thought of my work. The first show that I entered stipulated that all of the entries be for sale. With no intention of parting with my work, I priced mine several orders of magnitude above what I thought they were worth.
One sold, and with that began a 7-year period during which pretty much anything I painted with a maritime theme sold for hundreds of dollars. It was a nice ego trip, but it took me down a dark path in which I began to choose my subjects and style based on what I knew would sell. Creating was no longer something I did for a change of pace. I was now retired, but painting had become my job. I felt burdened by the obligation to paint enough to cover the walls of the restaurant that graciously hung my work.
Luckily, the epiphany that I had sacrificed my creative diversion, which began with that little sandpiper, coincided with the restaurant’s decision to redecorate and the loss of much of my hanging space. I was now free to paint subjects I was interested in, and return to the comfort of carving when I felt the need to create.
If you already have a creative diversion, remember that a large part of its appeal is that it plays counterpoint to your job. Even if you are retired, a hobby provides a change of pace from which we can all benefit.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
Dr. T. Berry Brazelton was a pioneer of child-centered parenting
You may not realize it, but as you navigated through this morning’s hospital rounds and your busy office schedule, some of what you did and how you did it was the result of the pioneering work of Boston-based pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, MD, who died March 13, 2018, at the age of 99.
You probably found the newborn you needed to examine in his mother’s hospital room. The 3-year-old in the croup tent was sharing his room with his father, who was sleeping on a cot at his crib side, and three out of the first four patients you saw in your office had been breastfed. These scenarios would have been unheard of 50 years ago. But Dr. Brazelton’s voice was the most widely heard, yet gentlest and persuasive in support of rooming-in and breastfeeding.
My fellow house officers and I had been accustomed to picking up infants to assess their tone. However, when Dr. Brazelton picked up a newborn, it was more like a conversation, an interview, and in a sense, it was a meeting of the minds.
It wasn’t that we had been rejecting the notion that a newborn could have a personality. It is just that we hadn’t been taught to look for it or to take it seriously. Dr. Brazelton taught us how to examine the person inside that little body and understand the importance of her temperament. By sharing what we learned from doing a Brazelton-style exam, we hoped to encourage the child’s parents to adopt more realistic expectations, and as a consequence, make parenting less mysterious and stressful.
When I first met Dr. Brazelton, he was in his mid-40s and just beginning on his trajectory toward national prominence. When we were assigned to take care of his hospitalized patients, it was obvious that his patient skills with sick children had taken a back seat to his interest in newborn temperament. He was more than willing to let us make the management decisions. In retrospect, that experience was a warning that I, like many other pediatricians, would face the similar challenge of maintaining my clinical skills in the face of a patient mix that was steadily acquiring a more behavioral and developmental flavor.
It is impossible to quantify the degree to which Dr. Brazelton’s ubiquity contributed to the popularity of a more child-centered parenting style. However, I think it would be unfair to blame him for the unfortunate phenomenon known as “helicopter parenting.”
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
You may not realize it, but as you navigated through this morning’s hospital rounds and your busy office schedule, some of what you did and how you did it was the result of the pioneering work of Boston-based pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, MD, who died March 13, 2018, at the age of 99.
You probably found the newborn you needed to examine in his mother’s hospital room. The 3-year-old in the croup tent was sharing his room with his father, who was sleeping on a cot at his crib side, and three out of the first four patients you saw in your office had been breastfed. These scenarios would have been unheard of 50 years ago. But Dr. Brazelton’s voice was the most widely heard, yet gentlest and persuasive in support of rooming-in and breastfeeding.
My fellow house officers and I had been accustomed to picking up infants to assess their tone. However, when Dr. Brazelton picked up a newborn, it was more like a conversation, an interview, and in a sense, it was a meeting of the minds.
It wasn’t that we had been rejecting the notion that a newborn could have a personality. It is just that we hadn’t been taught to look for it or to take it seriously. Dr. Brazelton taught us how to examine the person inside that little body and understand the importance of her temperament. By sharing what we learned from doing a Brazelton-style exam, we hoped to encourage the child’s parents to adopt more realistic expectations, and as a consequence, make parenting less mysterious and stressful.
When I first met Dr. Brazelton, he was in his mid-40s and just beginning on his trajectory toward national prominence. When we were assigned to take care of his hospitalized patients, it was obvious that his patient skills with sick children had taken a back seat to his interest in newborn temperament. He was more than willing to let us make the management decisions. In retrospect, that experience was a warning that I, like many other pediatricians, would face the similar challenge of maintaining my clinical skills in the face of a patient mix that was steadily acquiring a more behavioral and developmental flavor.
It is impossible to quantify the degree to which Dr. Brazelton’s ubiquity contributed to the popularity of a more child-centered parenting style. However, I think it would be unfair to blame him for the unfortunate phenomenon known as “helicopter parenting.”
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
You may not realize it, but as you navigated through this morning’s hospital rounds and your busy office schedule, some of what you did and how you did it was the result of the pioneering work of Boston-based pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, MD, who died March 13, 2018, at the age of 99.
You probably found the newborn you needed to examine in his mother’s hospital room. The 3-year-old in the croup tent was sharing his room with his father, who was sleeping on a cot at his crib side, and three out of the first four patients you saw in your office had been breastfed. These scenarios would have been unheard of 50 years ago. But Dr. Brazelton’s voice was the most widely heard, yet gentlest and persuasive in support of rooming-in and breastfeeding.
My fellow house officers and I had been accustomed to picking up infants to assess their tone. However, when Dr. Brazelton picked up a newborn, it was more like a conversation, an interview, and in a sense, it was a meeting of the minds.
It wasn’t that we had been rejecting the notion that a newborn could have a personality. It is just that we hadn’t been taught to look for it or to take it seriously. Dr. Brazelton taught us how to examine the person inside that little body and understand the importance of her temperament. By sharing what we learned from doing a Brazelton-style exam, we hoped to encourage the child’s parents to adopt more realistic expectations, and as a consequence, make parenting less mysterious and stressful.
When I first met Dr. Brazelton, he was in his mid-40s and just beginning on his trajectory toward national prominence. When we were assigned to take care of his hospitalized patients, it was obvious that his patient skills with sick children had taken a back seat to his interest in newborn temperament. He was more than willing to let us make the management decisions. In retrospect, that experience was a warning that I, like many other pediatricians, would face the similar challenge of maintaining my clinical skills in the face of a patient mix that was steadily acquiring a more behavioral and developmental flavor.
It is impossible to quantify the degree to which Dr. Brazelton’s ubiquity contributed to the popularity of a more child-centered parenting style. However, I think it would be unfair to blame him for the unfortunate phenomenon known as “helicopter parenting.”
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
Jump-starting the day
I’ve never been a fan of delayed school start times for high school students. The data just don’t impress me. But mostly I think delayed start times should be just one component of a broad community-wide initiative to address sleep hygiene that includes discussions about bedtimes, after-school schedules, and overuse of electronic devices. And I don’t see those discussions happening.
In most communities, delaying start times for adolescents will mean that younger children will be starting their school days earlier. Buses and drivers are finite and expensive resources that must be shared. Although I have heard it used as an argument against delayed school starts for high schoolers, an earlier start time for grade-school age children is not one of the downsides I include on my list of negatives. In fact, from my perspective, getting youngsters to school early is one of the few advantages of a delayed school start program for high school.
Underwritten by the Reebok athletic footwear manufacturer, the BOKS (Build Our Kids’ Success) program began in 2009 when a group of mothers in Massachusetts organized a before-school activity program in their local grade school (“A before-school exercise program may help children thrive,” by Gretchen Reynolds, New York Times, Feb. 14, 2018). They may have been motivated primarily by the need to survive those difficult morning hours, but clearly they weren’t alone in their concerns, and the concept has spread to include 3,000 schools worldwide.
Hoping to document the anecdotal observations of the program’s success, researchers from Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital surveyed children in 24 schools (“Effects of Before-School Physical Activity on Obesity Prevention and Wellness,” Am J Prev Med. 2018. Feb 12. doi: 10.1016/j.amepre.2018.01.017). Participation in the program was voluntary, and the control group consisted of children whose families chose not to participate. Those children in the before-school activity program 3 mornings per week were more likely to have lower body mass index z scores and “demonstrated improvement in their student engagement scores.” The children who participated only 2 days per week had no significant changes in their body mass index scores. However, they did demonstrate “significant improvements in positive affect and vitality/energy.”
The early-morning energy of youth is a given. The problem is that many children find themselves in home environments in which that energy is squandered or at least misdirected. School can be the environment in which that physical exuberance is allowed to run its natural course. We simply need the will to invest in what needs to be done to make it happen.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
I’ve never been a fan of delayed school start times for high school students. The data just don’t impress me. But mostly I think delayed start times should be just one component of a broad community-wide initiative to address sleep hygiene that includes discussions about bedtimes, after-school schedules, and overuse of electronic devices. And I don’t see those discussions happening.
In most communities, delaying start times for adolescents will mean that younger children will be starting their school days earlier. Buses and drivers are finite and expensive resources that must be shared. Although I have heard it used as an argument against delayed school starts for high schoolers, an earlier start time for grade-school age children is not one of the downsides I include on my list of negatives. In fact, from my perspective, getting youngsters to school early is one of the few advantages of a delayed school start program for high school.
Underwritten by the Reebok athletic footwear manufacturer, the BOKS (Build Our Kids’ Success) program began in 2009 when a group of mothers in Massachusetts organized a before-school activity program in their local grade school (“A before-school exercise program may help children thrive,” by Gretchen Reynolds, New York Times, Feb. 14, 2018). They may have been motivated primarily by the need to survive those difficult morning hours, but clearly they weren’t alone in their concerns, and the concept has spread to include 3,000 schools worldwide.
Hoping to document the anecdotal observations of the program’s success, researchers from Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital surveyed children in 24 schools (“Effects of Before-School Physical Activity on Obesity Prevention and Wellness,” Am J Prev Med. 2018. Feb 12. doi: 10.1016/j.amepre.2018.01.017). Participation in the program was voluntary, and the control group consisted of children whose families chose not to participate. Those children in the before-school activity program 3 mornings per week were more likely to have lower body mass index z scores and “demonstrated improvement in their student engagement scores.” The children who participated only 2 days per week had no significant changes in their body mass index scores. However, they did demonstrate “significant improvements in positive affect and vitality/energy.”
The early-morning energy of youth is a given. The problem is that many children find themselves in home environments in which that energy is squandered or at least misdirected. School can be the environment in which that physical exuberance is allowed to run its natural course. We simply need the will to invest in what needs to be done to make it happen.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
I’ve never been a fan of delayed school start times for high school students. The data just don’t impress me. But mostly I think delayed start times should be just one component of a broad community-wide initiative to address sleep hygiene that includes discussions about bedtimes, after-school schedules, and overuse of electronic devices. And I don’t see those discussions happening.
In most communities, delaying start times for adolescents will mean that younger children will be starting their school days earlier. Buses and drivers are finite and expensive resources that must be shared. Although I have heard it used as an argument against delayed school starts for high schoolers, an earlier start time for grade-school age children is not one of the downsides I include on my list of negatives. In fact, from my perspective, getting youngsters to school early is one of the few advantages of a delayed school start program for high school.
Underwritten by the Reebok athletic footwear manufacturer, the BOKS (Build Our Kids’ Success) program began in 2009 when a group of mothers in Massachusetts organized a before-school activity program in their local grade school (“A before-school exercise program may help children thrive,” by Gretchen Reynolds, New York Times, Feb. 14, 2018). They may have been motivated primarily by the need to survive those difficult morning hours, but clearly they weren’t alone in their concerns, and the concept has spread to include 3,000 schools worldwide.
Hoping to document the anecdotal observations of the program’s success, researchers from Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital surveyed children in 24 schools (“Effects of Before-School Physical Activity on Obesity Prevention and Wellness,” Am J Prev Med. 2018. Feb 12. doi: 10.1016/j.amepre.2018.01.017). Participation in the program was voluntary, and the control group consisted of children whose families chose not to participate. Those children in the before-school activity program 3 mornings per week were more likely to have lower body mass index z scores and “demonstrated improvement in their student engagement scores.” The children who participated only 2 days per week had no significant changes in their body mass index scores. However, they did demonstrate “significant improvements in positive affect and vitality/energy.”
The early-morning energy of youth is a given. The problem is that many children find themselves in home environments in which that energy is squandered or at least misdirected. School can be the environment in which that physical exuberance is allowed to run its natural course. We simply need the will to invest in what needs to be done to make it happen.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
Commonality
I grew up in a diversity-free zone. The bubble surrounding Pleasantville, New York, in the 1950s and 1960s didn’t include people of color. We were all middle-class, some upper, some lower, some blue collar, some white collar – but, all of us comfortably in the middle. The children with disabilities must have been hidden in their homes or housed in institutions. They certainly weren’t our classmates. We were spread across the broad Judeo-Christian spectrum. Who knew there were other religions?
Of course, when I left for college I entered another even less inclusive bubble that didn’t admit women.
For many years, the process that brought about this dramatic change was a fortuitous conglomeration of brush wars fought by courageous individuals and minority groups. However, in the last decade or two, the struggle for inclusion has broadened under the banner of diversity, a term once primarily used to describe evolving ecologic populations. In light of this expanding definition, it is not surprising that the American Academy of Pediatrics has begun to consider its role in promoting diversity. As reported in AAP News (Anne Hegland, March 2018) the American Academy of Pediatrics board of directors recently discussed a plan for implementing at “all levels of the Academy” the suggestions of its Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion.
The academy is in the enviable positive of having a membership that agrees in general terms where its priorities should be – the health and welfare of children. It can afford to invest some of its energies in being more inclusive. However, the United States currently is struggling to rediscover a set of priorities that its citizens can agree on. We have politicians who would rather win a battle over their adversaries than address the obvious needs of the country. And, we have journalists who prefer to feast on these battles rather than search for evidence of cooperation. This is not a time to sharpen our focus on how different we are from one another. It is time to raise another flag along side the “diversity” banner. It should read “commonality,” and remind us that while we are celebrating our differences, we must work harder to uncover the core values that we share.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
I grew up in a diversity-free zone. The bubble surrounding Pleasantville, New York, in the 1950s and 1960s didn’t include people of color. We were all middle-class, some upper, some lower, some blue collar, some white collar – but, all of us comfortably in the middle. The children with disabilities must have been hidden in their homes or housed in institutions. They certainly weren’t our classmates. We were spread across the broad Judeo-Christian spectrum. Who knew there were other religions?
Of course, when I left for college I entered another even less inclusive bubble that didn’t admit women.
For many years, the process that brought about this dramatic change was a fortuitous conglomeration of brush wars fought by courageous individuals and minority groups. However, in the last decade or two, the struggle for inclusion has broadened under the banner of diversity, a term once primarily used to describe evolving ecologic populations. In light of this expanding definition, it is not surprising that the American Academy of Pediatrics has begun to consider its role in promoting diversity. As reported in AAP News (Anne Hegland, March 2018) the American Academy of Pediatrics board of directors recently discussed a plan for implementing at “all levels of the Academy” the suggestions of its Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion.
The academy is in the enviable positive of having a membership that agrees in general terms where its priorities should be – the health and welfare of children. It can afford to invest some of its energies in being more inclusive. However, the United States currently is struggling to rediscover a set of priorities that its citizens can agree on. We have politicians who would rather win a battle over their adversaries than address the obvious needs of the country. And, we have journalists who prefer to feast on these battles rather than search for evidence of cooperation. This is not a time to sharpen our focus on how different we are from one another. It is time to raise another flag along side the “diversity” banner. It should read “commonality,” and remind us that while we are celebrating our differences, we must work harder to uncover the core values that we share.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
I grew up in a diversity-free zone. The bubble surrounding Pleasantville, New York, in the 1950s and 1960s didn’t include people of color. We were all middle-class, some upper, some lower, some blue collar, some white collar – but, all of us comfortably in the middle. The children with disabilities must have been hidden in their homes or housed in institutions. They certainly weren’t our classmates. We were spread across the broad Judeo-Christian spectrum. Who knew there were other religions?
Of course, when I left for college I entered another even less inclusive bubble that didn’t admit women.
For many years, the process that brought about this dramatic change was a fortuitous conglomeration of brush wars fought by courageous individuals and minority groups. However, in the last decade or two, the struggle for inclusion has broadened under the banner of diversity, a term once primarily used to describe evolving ecologic populations. In light of this expanding definition, it is not surprising that the American Academy of Pediatrics has begun to consider its role in promoting diversity. As reported in AAP News (Anne Hegland, March 2018) the American Academy of Pediatrics board of directors recently discussed a plan for implementing at “all levels of the Academy” the suggestions of its Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion.
The academy is in the enviable positive of having a membership that agrees in general terms where its priorities should be – the health and welfare of children. It can afford to invest some of its energies in being more inclusive. However, the United States currently is struggling to rediscover a set of priorities that its citizens can agree on. We have politicians who would rather win a battle over their adversaries than address the obvious needs of the country. And, we have journalists who prefer to feast on these battles rather than search for evidence of cooperation. This is not a time to sharpen our focus on how different we are from one another. It is time to raise another flag along side the “diversity” banner. It should read “commonality,” and remind us that while we are celebrating our differences, we must work harder to uncover the core values that we share.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
Is there a resilience deficit?
Even if you have never experienced a symptom of burnout, you probably have at least one colleague who has. In the last decade, collateral damage from physician burnout has earned it a place on the agenda of the American Academy of Pediatrics and most other physician organizations.
When one steps back and takes a longer view, burnout is simply a poor fit between physicians and their roles. An increasing number of physicians are finding themselves in jobs in which – for a variety of reasons – they feel uncomfortable. Eventually, the discomfort resulting from that poor fit becomes so unbearable the only solution is to change jobs or retire.
However, an article in Pediatrics entitled “Seeking professional resilience” addresses burnout from the perspective that physician vulnerability is a major contributor to the problem (Pediatrics. 2018, Feb 1. doi: 10.1542/peds.2017-2388). The author, Abby R. Rosenberg, MD, suggests that one solution to burnout is helping physicians learn how “to maintain physical and emotional well-being in the face of adversity,” that is, “resilience.”
It turns out that the recent buzz surrounding “resilience” has drawn a throng of theorists. I guess if we can have chaos theory, we can have resilience theories. Dr. Rosenberg sorts these theories into three categories based on whether they consider resilience an intrinsic trait, a process of adaptation, or an outcome. She offers an alternative description in which resilience is conceived as “a process of harnessing the resources we need to sustain well-being.” Dr. Rosenberg’s suggestions of how this harnessing process can be achieved are certainly worth reading, but I fear that most physicians threatened with burnout won’t have the time or the composure to follow her recommendations. Fifty years of watching physicians both thrive and flame out has convinced me that in most cases, resilience is an intrinsic trait gifted to the recipient at birth.
I am sure there are older physicians who believe that burnout is just another case of “they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to” and would claim that young physicians just don’t have the same grit that we had a generation ago. I guess it is possible that the shift away from the owner/operator model toward one in which a physician has become a cog in the wheel of a large corporation has selected for physicians who are less resilient by nature. But I suspect that the number of resilient physicians is unchanged over the last hundred years. It is more likely that even those blessed with a resilient nature enter their training challenged by a burden of debt significantly greater than my peers and I faced 50 years ago.
The problem isn’t the resiliency deficit. Burnout is the result of a job that has evolved into one with challenges that even the more resilient physicians struggle to tolerate. Under a litigious cloud, hunched over a computer for half the day, the modern physician must struggle to find relevance in a situation in which he has relinquished control to a system that may not share his values.
Refining the selection process to find even more resilient candidates for medical school might lower the burnout rate by a point or two. However, the real answer requires a major overhaul of medical delivery system so that providers can once again feel that every hour they invest is meaningful. The privilege to practice medicine always has required sacrifices on the part of the physician. However, without a sense of purpose, these sacrifices can become intolerable.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
Even if you have never experienced a symptom of burnout, you probably have at least one colleague who has. In the last decade, collateral damage from physician burnout has earned it a place on the agenda of the American Academy of Pediatrics and most other physician organizations.
When one steps back and takes a longer view, burnout is simply a poor fit between physicians and their roles. An increasing number of physicians are finding themselves in jobs in which – for a variety of reasons – they feel uncomfortable. Eventually, the discomfort resulting from that poor fit becomes so unbearable the only solution is to change jobs or retire.
However, an article in Pediatrics entitled “Seeking professional resilience” addresses burnout from the perspective that physician vulnerability is a major contributor to the problem (Pediatrics. 2018, Feb 1. doi: 10.1542/peds.2017-2388). The author, Abby R. Rosenberg, MD, suggests that one solution to burnout is helping physicians learn how “to maintain physical and emotional well-being in the face of adversity,” that is, “resilience.”
It turns out that the recent buzz surrounding “resilience” has drawn a throng of theorists. I guess if we can have chaos theory, we can have resilience theories. Dr. Rosenberg sorts these theories into three categories based on whether they consider resilience an intrinsic trait, a process of adaptation, or an outcome. She offers an alternative description in which resilience is conceived as “a process of harnessing the resources we need to sustain well-being.” Dr. Rosenberg’s suggestions of how this harnessing process can be achieved are certainly worth reading, but I fear that most physicians threatened with burnout won’t have the time or the composure to follow her recommendations. Fifty years of watching physicians both thrive and flame out has convinced me that in most cases, resilience is an intrinsic trait gifted to the recipient at birth.
I am sure there are older physicians who believe that burnout is just another case of “they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to” and would claim that young physicians just don’t have the same grit that we had a generation ago. I guess it is possible that the shift away from the owner/operator model toward one in which a physician has become a cog in the wheel of a large corporation has selected for physicians who are less resilient by nature. But I suspect that the number of resilient physicians is unchanged over the last hundred years. It is more likely that even those blessed with a resilient nature enter their training challenged by a burden of debt significantly greater than my peers and I faced 50 years ago.
The problem isn’t the resiliency deficit. Burnout is the result of a job that has evolved into one with challenges that even the more resilient physicians struggle to tolerate. Under a litigious cloud, hunched over a computer for half the day, the modern physician must struggle to find relevance in a situation in which he has relinquished control to a system that may not share his values.
Refining the selection process to find even more resilient candidates for medical school might lower the burnout rate by a point or two. However, the real answer requires a major overhaul of medical delivery system so that providers can once again feel that every hour they invest is meaningful. The privilege to practice medicine always has required sacrifices on the part of the physician. However, without a sense of purpose, these sacrifices can become intolerable.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].
Even if you have never experienced a symptom of burnout, you probably have at least one colleague who has. In the last decade, collateral damage from physician burnout has earned it a place on the agenda of the American Academy of Pediatrics and most other physician organizations.
When one steps back and takes a longer view, burnout is simply a poor fit between physicians and their roles. An increasing number of physicians are finding themselves in jobs in which – for a variety of reasons – they feel uncomfortable. Eventually, the discomfort resulting from that poor fit becomes so unbearable the only solution is to change jobs or retire.
However, an article in Pediatrics entitled “Seeking professional resilience” addresses burnout from the perspective that physician vulnerability is a major contributor to the problem (Pediatrics. 2018, Feb 1. doi: 10.1542/peds.2017-2388). The author, Abby R. Rosenberg, MD, suggests that one solution to burnout is helping physicians learn how “to maintain physical and emotional well-being in the face of adversity,” that is, “resilience.”
It turns out that the recent buzz surrounding “resilience” has drawn a throng of theorists. I guess if we can have chaos theory, we can have resilience theories. Dr. Rosenberg sorts these theories into three categories based on whether they consider resilience an intrinsic trait, a process of adaptation, or an outcome. She offers an alternative description in which resilience is conceived as “a process of harnessing the resources we need to sustain well-being.” Dr. Rosenberg’s suggestions of how this harnessing process can be achieved are certainly worth reading, but I fear that most physicians threatened with burnout won’t have the time or the composure to follow her recommendations. Fifty years of watching physicians both thrive and flame out has convinced me that in most cases, resilience is an intrinsic trait gifted to the recipient at birth.
I am sure there are older physicians who believe that burnout is just another case of “they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to” and would claim that young physicians just don’t have the same grit that we had a generation ago. I guess it is possible that the shift away from the owner/operator model toward one in which a physician has become a cog in the wheel of a large corporation has selected for physicians who are less resilient by nature. But I suspect that the number of resilient physicians is unchanged over the last hundred years. It is more likely that even those blessed with a resilient nature enter their training challenged by a burden of debt significantly greater than my peers and I faced 50 years ago.
The problem isn’t the resiliency deficit. Burnout is the result of a job that has evolved into one with challenges that even the more resilient physicians struggle to tolerate. Under a litigious cloud, hunched over a computer for half the day, the modern physician must struggle to find relevance in a situation in which he has relinquished control to a system that may not share his values.
Refining the selection process to find even more resilient candidates for medical school might lower the burnout rate by a point or two. However, the real answer requires a major overhaul of medical delivery system so that providers can once again feel that every hour they invest is meaningful. The privilege to practice medicine always has required sacrifices on the part of the physician. However, without a sense of purpose, these sacrifices can become intolerable.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at [email protected].