Physicians are sometimes thrust into leadership because they’re well liked or they are good doctors. But often they don’t understand how to lead, how to discipline doctors who last week were their best friends, or how to push doctors to better achieve clinically. I can provide support to new ER directors or experienced directors who would just like another opinion or a mentor to bounce ideas off.
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ER flow, new ER construction
I’ve spent 12 years in the director's seat working to achieve the goals of throughput times and patient satisfaction expectations. I’ve also been involved in the ground-up construction or re-do’s of three emergency departments. I can bring that experience to your ER and work with you to improve the care, times, and satisfaction scores of your department, and suggest ways in which you can reconfigure your department to achieve better work efficiencies.
Physician work environments are often overlooked, which often translates into how a physician treats the staff and the patients. The assumption can be that the physician is intelligent, wealthy, and gets to take care of sick people for a living; therefore, he must be deliriously happy with his job and his life. As we’ve all seen, that is often not the case. Ensuring that physicians' work environment is optimized can result in improvements in care and relationships with nursing, medical staff members, and administration. I’ve addressed these issues in my leadership roles with physicians and seen firsthand the benefits of happy doctors who treat each other well, respect their vocations, and respect an administration that cares enough to look after them.
Discussions about work environment also address the expectations of how the physician treats those around him or her, how he or she engages the nursing staff to participate in the clinical care of the patient—specifically the staff's being open to nursing ideas and nurse ordering, etc., how physicians engage and treat consultants, and how they interact with administration when changes or improvements need to be made.
Previous Work
I was able to merge two groups in Wichita (KS) that were in separate ER’s/separate hospitals into one well functioning group that liked and respected each other, with less supplement from the hospital and with higher salaries to the doctors, and grew the business from 65,000 to 110,000 patients/year for the two ER’s over the period of time I was director.
I was also able to retain physicians at Spartanburg Regional Hospital, who were wanting to walk out on their current contract, and help grow the group to include 16 additional doctors. We also addressed group issues of physician interaction and treatment of each other. We improved the care and the clinical measures and lowered the prior hospital supplement to the group while improving reimbursement to the doctors.