Work-life balance is not an accident

Here are the stories you missed on KevinMD. Thank you for your continuing readership. --------------------------------------------------------------- Here are the stories you missed on [KevinMD](. Thank you for your continuing readership. --------------------------------------------------------------- Sponsors [Tax planning tips for physicians](. Don't miss these deductions and tax strategies from the [Wall Street Alliance Group](. [The Guide to Secure Messaging in Healthcare](. Learn strategies for keeping your data secure, how to make secure messaging part of a larger communication system, ways to roll out your solution, and more. [Read the ultimate guide]( to defining and deploying secure messaging in health care. Due to differences between an in-person patient visit and telehealth, documentation is essential in proving the standard of care has been met in a telehealth visit. [Consider 9 tips]( for documenting telehealth care. Coming soon: [Rosen's Emergency Medicine, 10th Edition](. Preorder your copy today! [Shop Elsevier Health]( for free shipping on all newly published medical books. --------------------------------------------------------------- KevinMD Plus: Mar 21, 2022 [Work-life balance is not an accident]( I describe work-life balance not as a see-saw with one side going up while the other goes down, but more like a wobble board with imbalance possibilities in infinite directions. Now that I’m in my fifties with grown kids, I feel compelled to share what I think I did right — and on what I [...] [Avoiding medical malpractice in the wake of the pandemic]( Almost ten years ago, there was a knock at the door. My children and I were playing games as it was only a few days after Christmas. All of us answered the door, and there stood a sheriff with papers. He said those dreaded words, “you are served.” As I closed the door, I tried [...] [Let’s talk about bullying in medicine]( Very few are talking about workplace bullying, yet many are benefitting from it. It acts contrary to the principles of care at the heart of medicine — and we need to do something about it. How many physicians have wanted to leave medicine because they were subject to horizontal violence or bullying in the workplace? [...] [New medical students: Do not take yourself too seriously]( When you are trapped in a locker room in only your underwear at 3 a.m., you realize how many things must have gone wrong for you to land in that spot. Within the first week of my clinical rotations, I managed to be bested by the scrub machine. It was a strong start, to say [...] [A burnout coach saved my medical career — and possibly my life]( I almost quit my job in 2014. I didn’t like my life, and I didn’t like myself. I had a lot of problems personally and professionally, and I wondered if I was good enough to solve them. I often felt weak and powerless. People were coming to me for answers, but I sometimes felt like [...] [We are behavioral health nurses and we want to thank our public safety officers (PSOs)]( We are nurses. We are in highly dangerous and volatile units at hospitals. We are not working in a prison. We work in behavioral health. The intensive management unit, the adolescent unit, the dual-diagnosis unit, and the behavioral health emergency department. We are specially trained to protect ourselves and others with CPI — a mandatory [...] [Unrequited: love in the time of COVID-19 [PODCAST]]( “If you knew we are like the ‘Two Fridas,’ that our hearts are connected, would you change your mind? Would you stop as you are about to cut the artery feeding your heart and mine? If you knew that when you cry because of your loneliness, because of your longing for your family, that I [...] [Coding for social determinants of health and unmet social needs]( In health care circles these days, you hear about the social determinants of health (SDOH) almost as often as you hear: “You’re on mute!” SDOH are the conditions in the places where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect health outcomes. These non-medical factors like income, socioeconomic status and access [...] [Prioritizing patient safety during a global pandemic]( A guest column by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, exclusive to KevinMD. The refrigerated trucks had not yet left our parking lot when I got an email from the IT department. It was late spring 2020, and deploying a new electronic health record system for the anesthesia department was not front of mind. We had been [...] [The nursing home staffing crisis will not be fixed through transparency]( Staffing shortages and turnover rates have recently become a pertinent topic for hospitals. However, these personnel challenges have haunted certified nursing facilities since the 1970s. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the turnover rate for total nursing staff in nursing homes was about 128 percent. While increasing transparency on these atrociously high turnover rates has been [...] [How a code profoundly affected this physician [PODCAST]]( “There is a small amount of literature about secondary trauma. This means that the people who respond to trauma (firefighters, police, doctors, EMTs, etc.) experience PTSD from experiences they were not the primary victims of. I haven’t read the literature, and I don’t know what qualifies. I do know that this is the single worst [...] [The first time of death]( Keeping someone alive? I could do that. After all, that’s what medical school taught, ways to save lives. Give me a disease, and I could find the algorithm. Death, however, was murky, messy, and confusing. An algorithm does not exist. There is no uniform response to provide grieving family members at bedside. Death was its [...] [10 colorectal pearls for Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month]( March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month. Share these gems with your family, friends, and patients. Take the time to reflect on your personal history and encourage yourself and others to get screened when appropriate. 1. The large intestine or the large bowel consists of the colon, rectum, and anus. The colon and rectum have a [...] [When the government comes for your trans kid]( Even before I turned 16, I knew I liked girls. I also knew I liked boys. I didn’t understand it. Why was I drawn to women? During that period of my life (between 11 and 16 years of age), I was also in a boarding school. An all-girl boarding school, for that matter. It was [...] [Looking back on 2 years of uncertainty, adversity and more than a few silver linings]( Since the beginning of COVID-19, we have recognized the truth of philosopher George Santayana’s oft-quoted 1905 writing — “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — and looked for lessons from the 1918 Spanish flu, the deadliest pandemic of the 20th century. Much was different, yet so much the same. There [...] [Managing expectations during COVID-19 [PODCAST]]( “I had sent an email to some key people in my organization about managing patients’ expectations and how that needed to be addressed differently on an organizational level. The truth of the matter is that I am powerless to change the way the system handles a lot of things. The more personally relevant issue is [...] [Advocating for a sick parent by confronting physician bias]( I spent the first three days sitting next to my dad’s hospital bed, watching his chest rise and fall slowly. He was asleep the majority of the time, fighting off something unknown. Anytime he moved, I jumped up from my chair and stood where he could see me just in case his eyes fluttered open [...] [Don’t be silent about eating disorders]( Until recently, I have remained relatively silent in the realm of eating disorder advocacy and silenced by the exhaustion of my own lived experience with an eating disorder. However, my silence further contributed to the pain. So now, I speak. And as I speak, I will reflect on the issues that led to my former [...] [How an AI bot transformed my EHR experience]( What is it about the documentation of patient encounters that is so aggravating? I was ecstatic to be part of the generation that entered the computer age in medicine. The first day I opened a chart on a pull-down menu within a pixelated screen I felt like I was ushering in the future. We would [...] [Kids are not OK: Health care is failing them [PODCAST]]( “Our children are not OK. Our pediatricians are not OK. Please, let us not further ignore and jeopardize the future health of our society. Pediatrics needs a transformational change to direct primary care and other models that transition from transactional care to relational care. Encourage your employer to embrace direct primary care for children. The [...] --------------------------------------------------------------- [Thousands of physicians are browsing this job board](. They love its selection of over 12,000 openings across the U.S. [Physicians are finding opportunities they almost missed](. --------------------------------------------------------------- If a friend sent you this email and you want to subscribe, go to [KevinMD](. --------------------------------------------------------------- 345 Hudson Street New York NY 10014 USA [Unsubscribe]( | [Change Subscriber Options](