Healthcare’s Missing Logic – Preventing Burnout Through a Strong Practice Culture featuring Natasha Beauvais, MD

On episode 160 of Healthcare’s MissingLogic®, Dr. Tracy Christopherson and Dr. Michelle Troseth chat with special guest Dr. Natasha Beauvais about preventing burnout through a strong practice culture. Dr. Beauvais shares some of the biggest challenges to remaining “human” in the workplace and strategies for creating a practice culture that benefits both patients and healthcare workers. She also discusses some of her greatest hopes to accelerate the improvement of our cultures and human development through our collective experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Event Highlights:

• “When I can learn with clarity that I’m the source of the problem—that if I don’t change, I can’t get anybody to do anything differently—then it really changes my relationship to the problem.”
• “If everyone is able to look at something that they would like to get better at and begin to understand that they might be causing their own roadblock accidentally, then we can change it because we can see it. You can’t change what you can’t see.”
• “What I also love about this model is that it’s not focusing on the top five people in the organization that we’ve decided to give a little extra support. It’s really embracing that every person is capable of growth and change, and actually, every person is hungry for growth and change.”
• “Hierarchy can sometimes create a situation where people fall silent. And if we’re really going to have a more human organization, we need to have what I would call a flatter organization, you know, where we have input from all the voices at all the levels.”
• “I think a lot of it goes back to trust. Do we trust ourselves? Are we confident enough in ourselves to realize that what we think matters?”
• “Every single person in the organization wrote down that they really wanted to grow. I was delighted about that and also a little surprised just because in some people it’s so easy to see their forward growth, and in some people, it’s less easy to see. I realized my job is not just to celebrate those who are already figuring it out, but to embrace all of these people, all of whom have a huge amount to offer within the healthcare environment.”
• “We have people who have worked in healthcare for 20 years. Those people are here because they really, really care about other people; they have tremendous empathy. So everyone really wants to be here. But if you have an environment where people are carrying naturally all the time, it’s so easy to be exhausted from that.”
• “We checked in with each other at the beginning of these staff meetings to share just two minutes of our outside lives. Suddenly, everyone understood what we were each carrying. There was a sense of deep understanding and mutuality. Ironically, it takes a little extra time, but then we’re all freed up to be here to do what we really love doing.”
• “It’s really natural for healthcare providers to want to be offering compassion to patients because that’s kind of what healthcare is. But to be really received in a compassionate way by other coworkers — it creates a connection, but it also creates freedom. It’s like, okay, they understand me, and now I can go forward.”