The Concept of Profession, Career and Calling

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By  |  December 8, 2008 | 

Rob Bessler writes…

Welcome to our SHM blog. I would like to thank Leslie Flores and SHM for giving me the opportunity to stimulate discussion on issues relevant to all of us blogging to the practice management blog.  My role and work life for the past 9 years have been focused on building a sustainable high quality hospitalist practice model. We have done so by recruiting and retaining great people and continually learning how to make the practice better at each site. I will not be speaking from the standpoint of Sound Inpatient Physicians alone but from all that we have seen from both taking over other challenged practices and solving many of our hospitalist communities challenges.

The hottest issue on my mind as we enter into a new year deals with the concept of profession, career and calling.  We work alongside many residents that will soon be hospitalists and outpatient colleagues. We hire many experienced physicians and new grads alike.  We have all witnessed the changes in healthcare over the last decade, whether a 60 year old “happy hospitalist”- because of the quality of life/career prolongation hospital medicine has brought you and your ability to still practice in an intellectually stimulating environment (Sound has a thriving 71 year old hospitalist who also swims a mile each day, and spends his weeks off at a mountain lake!) – or a new grad who loves taking care of sick patients and can’t get enough of the 26 weeks off per year their practice allows.

I always enjoy interviewing candidates and try to be part of the process across our whole organization as much as possible. When I hear someone that loves medicine, I am sold. When they tell me about the thank you’s from patients, the great diagnosis or the intellectual stimulation, I am very encouraged about career opportunities for the person across the table from me.  We want as many physicians as possible to have deep in their core the feeling that medicine is a calling, not a job. We have a strong focus as an organization on balance and manageable encounters to practice high quality medicine. The specialty has a strong focus on the concept of time off vs the quality of the time on.

I am interested to provoke conversation around how people explore the concept of the time on and how they perceive the benefits of this time vs the time off.  How about you?

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2 Comments

  1. Ivan Rozorf January 17, 2009 at 6:34 am - Reply

    It has long been looking for this information, Thank you for your work.

  2. Maria January 27, 2009 at 7:18 am - Reply

    Nice work! I’ll have to do a cross post on this one 😉

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