Shawn Whatley, Author at shawn whatley md

How to Manage Doctors

Patients often ask, “Do you know of a good doctor?”

Managers ask something similar: How do we identify good doctors and manage them?

Patients ask because they want good care. Managers ask because they want to make doctors good. Or because they want to learn what it means to be good, if one is a doctor.

This post adds a new discovery to our previous discussions:

Impossible to Manage Doctors? (July 2016)

Manage Doctors for Patient Benefit (Dec 2016)

Should Doctors be More Accountable? (Sep 2018)

How to Change Doctors Behaviour (Dec 2018)

How to Manage Doctors

Patients find good doctors by asking around.

Managers cannot ask around. Even if they could, they would not. Managers measure. They benchmark, spot check, and create colourful reports with pie charts. They want to manage, not just find. Continue reading “How to Manage Doctors”

How To Choose A Great Career

A happy life is rare without the right career.

We all want happiness, so we are all desperate to pick a career that we love. Especially doctors.

Choose poorly and we end up surviving on an income that we cannot live without, trapped in a job we cannot tolerate.

But we are desperate for the wrong thing.

Here is a bit of stupid advice: Do what you love, and you never have to work a day in your life. But just because you love to pound drums for screaming fans does not mean you would love to do it for galley slaves.

Bad questions always give wrong answers. We ask what we want to be or do. What do we love? But the question is incomplete. It is equally important to ask about how, where, and under what conditions we would like to work.

Career Choice

When someone asks you for career advice, I suggest you ask:

Do you love customer service?

Does structure help or hold you back?

Do you want responsibility and control?

Customer Service

The essence of customer service is solving problems for someone who holds power. Serving someone whether they want it or not, in whatever way seems best to you, is not service. Continue reading “How To Choose A Great Career”

Doctors’ Existential Crisis

‘Existential’ is the word of the year for 2019. Popular use of existential peaked when hippies and psychedelics were cool. But it is in style again.

Dictionaries tell us that existential refers to existence (which doesn’t help much). An existential crisis occurs when we realize our existence is something other than what we believed.

As Ted explained, in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, “All we are is dust in the wind, dude.”

Existential Crisis

Doctoring has changed and become something that doctors were never trained to deliver.

Sensitive, hard-working students turn into weary doctors, who walk through clinics by willing each leg to move. One more patient. One less name on the day-sheet. One leg forward. Then the other leg. I can do this.

Medical students learn one thing, but we expect them to practice something else after graduation.

Medical training creates a secular, pseudo-religiosity unique to clinical care. Huddled around naked parts, noses pressed low to the point of interest, learners mumble medicalese, sotto voce.

At the professor’s lead, they straighten up in unison. The professor blesses his patient with soft generalizations. The Padawans nod and smile behind him.

Having mumbled and blessed, the gnostics form a confessional line. They shuffle off, white robes swishing, to huddle over the next patient. Continue reading “Doctors’ Existential Crisis”