Flexibility and Your First Physician Job

As most residency programs don’t include an elective entitled “Negotiating your dream job,” many first time physician job seekers understandably feel a bit overwhelmed as their training comes to a close. To assuage these concerns, many may feel the need to draft up a list of the “non-negotiables” essential to their first physician job.

So which aspects of your physician job search can you relax? Follow the link to learn more…

Physician Self Care Tips for 2020

With the dawn of a new year and decade, why not take a moment to reflect on a few simple self care tactics and strategies that can alter and improve the course of life.

How To Explore A New Job Market As An Emergency Physician

Working as an attending means a greater degree of responsibility than working as a resident. You are more likely to have hospital or system-level roles, be involved with committees or champion hospital initiatives.   Having a sense of the job market gives insight into the context of your job interest and enables you make the best possible decision when pursuing a job.

For the purposes of this post, I’ll presume you know nothing about an area—you’re moving to a new location and would like to size up a job market that is completely foreign to you. Any information you have by word-of-mouth will only help solidify what you gather by using the approach below.

Medical Malpractice Insurance Explained

When considering medical malpractice insurance, it is important to understand what is and is not covered to ensure adequate protection. This article offers a basic explainer on the various types of malpractice insurance including; claims made, nose & tail coverage, occurrence based policies, and claims-paid policies.

Providing Comfort While Avoiding Conversational Narcissism

Death is an unavoidable. Whether you experience it at work or at home, you’ll need to be ready for how you’ll react. Practice. Memorize. Prepare yourself. When the time comes, you’ll be a great comfort to the family of your patient and know that you’ve done the right thing.

Choosing a Specialty in Medical School

Deciding upon a specialty can be one of the most difficult tasks faced by medical students during their training. As if the stress of studying for cardiology was not enough, now you’re being asked to select rotations and to make some of your elective choices based on what your chosen specialty will be. For many students, this added layer of anxiety comes without a clear idea of how to choose a specialty. While we have guides that tell us how to examine patients, how to take tests, even how to grade a patient’s stool, the medical school curriculum doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of a systematic approach to selecting the specialty you will dedicate your life to. What follows are some simple first steps to aid you in this process, and to hopefully help you find your dream specialty.

Intern Year Reflections: A Roller Coaster of Emotions

Intern year is a year of mountains and valleys, full of failure, forgetting, and dreariness followed quickly by success, learning, and elation. Wallow in its instability and allow it to let you grow into a wonderfully dynamic physician. I promise you’ll get to the other side glad you tackled the ride.

Financial Planning for Resident Physicians

For most hard-working residents, paying rent and bills on time each month can feel like a minor miracle. Financial planning might consist of little more than turning student loan payments on auto-pay. While resident salaries do not leave much room for investing and saving, the years young doctors spend in residency represent an important time during which a few simple moves can help to set the groundwork for a more sound financial future.

Opportunities for Retired Physicians

Many physicians spend early retirement in a state of shock. Are there really that many hours in the day? Restlessness and boredom set in quickly. You haven’t spent so much time with your significant other since…. ever. That may be an awakening. Income may not stretch as far as expected, or unforeseen obligations arise. There may be a yearning, still, to make a difference.

Five Ways Medical Culture Harms the Doctor-Patient Relationship

Current medical culture has evolved over thousands of years. It dictates how we treat each other and ourselves. It’s an insidious culture of self-neglect, unspoken hierarchies, jousting, and undervalued humanity.

As physicians, we are expected to establish rapport and trust with our patients while enmeshed in medical culture. Our “values, norms, and practices” are to care for patients as we would our own family members. The success we’re striving for is to have best possible outcome for all of our patients.

But our goals and culture are antagonistic; good patient outcomes will occur despite medical culture, not because of it.

The following are just five ways medical culture undermines the efforts to establish a successful doctor-patient relationship.