Browse By Topic and Related Items

Topic Browser

Topic: Career Development Clinical Legal News Practice Management Public Policy Quality SHM SHM Annual Meeting Trends

Related Items

• Email this article

• Filed under: Departments, SHM, Society Pages

• Keywords: job satisfaction, workload, annual meeting, career development, work-life balance

Satisfaction Is Job No. 1

From: The Hospitalist, April 2008

by Chad Whelan

The Career Satisfaction Task Force has focused on two key areas this year to build upon the work that resulted in last year’s white paper “A Challenge for a New Specialty: A White Paper on Hospitalist Career Satisfaction.”

The paper outlined a framework for hospital medicine program leaders and hospitalists to identify important components of matching individuals and programs for the best job fit.

This year, the task force is working to bring the white paper to life and moving it from a conceptual framework to demonstrating how to use it to solve real issues facing programs and individuals.

The first of these projects was a Webinar led by SHM Senior Vice President Joe Miller, Sylvia McKean, MD (course director of Hospital Medicine 2008), and Win Whitcomb, MD (a co-founder of SHM). Each of them has held leadership roles on this task force. About 80 people participated in the December event, and more than three-fourths of attendees rated it highly.

At last year’s Annual Meeting in Dallas, the white paper was presented in a task force workshop. In keeping with our aim to bring the framework to life, this year’s workshop will use real case studies to demonstrate how to use bring the concepts to solutions. The workshop will be facilitated by Chad Whelan, MD, assistant professor of medicine and director of the Hospitalists Scholars Training Program, University of Chicago. Discussing key concepts will be Doug Carlson, MD, associate professor, Pediatrics Division, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and Tosha Wetterneck, MD, University of Wisconsin Hospital/Clinics, Madison. Drs. Carlson and Wetterneck made significant contributions to the white paper. In this highly interactive workshop, case studies that demonstrate challenges with workload/scheduling and autonomy will be discussed. Drs. Carlson and Wetterneck will lead the participants through discussions aimed at identifying the root causes of struggle and potential solutions for the program.

In the coming months, we hope to develop a series of articles to be published in The Hospitalist addressing the issues of greatest importance for career satisfaction.

The task force realizes there may be opportunities to add knowledge about career satisfaction and provide a valuable service to SHM member. We are in the early stages of developing a survey geared to further clarifying the most important factors in making satisfying career matches as well as providing detailed feedback about programs to their leaders. We are seeking funding to enable us to begin this exciting work.