Resilience and Renewal: Strategies for Faculty Engagement and Education

Introduction: The purpose of this presentation is to describe how, when faced with a professional catastrophe, one can learn resilience. In particular, my experience with a research subject death led me to earn a law degree and re-frame my academic career. Recent efforts have included a series of risk reduction initiatives focused on educating Department of Surgery faculty on topics directed at mitigating malpractice risk.
Methods Twelve years’ worth (2009 – 2021) of risk reduction initiatives were reviewed for faculty education updating some of the data I presented at last year’s ESMED General Assembly. This work has continued to be successful with three elements that seem to be important: 1) Choose topics that matter to surgical faculty; 2) Embed faculty champions within each division so that the planned initiatives are perceived to arise from within rather than imposed from without; and, 3) use positive reinforcement rather than negative.
Results: Forty-seven total initiative were directed at faculty surgeons (Table). The most numerous created procedure-specific informed consent documents comprising >350 individual forms (data not shown) covering all ten Department of Surgery divisions (Cardiac, Colorectal, Endocrine and Oncologic, Emergency/Critical Care, GI, Plastics, Thoracic, Transplant, Urology, Vascular). Another major effort is to track read results through provider pools and keeping pools up to date in terms of onboarding and off-boarding faculty and other clinicians. Ten faculty courses have been given on topics including medical malpractice, informed consent, inpatient and outpatient communication, and proper disclosure of medical error. Much of this work has been published. With rare exception, these initiatives have been successfully completed
Faculty Initiatives N
Procedure-specific informed eConsents 13
Improved documentation and results review 11
Faculty Courses 10
Report select morbidity and mortality events to risk management 3
Upgrade Faculty On call Scheduling 2
Other 6
Total 46
Summary and Conclusions: We also published data showing a decrease in malpractice claims and premium costs associated with our on-going program of risk reduction initiatives. To this end, our Department has been able to receive rebate dollars from our malpractice premiums as an incentive to further our work.