Healthcare Leaders, Are You Listening? with Diane Shannon, MD

After experiencing paralyzing burnout as a newly-minted primary care physician, Dr. Diane Shannon made the hard decision to leave practice and pursue a career in writing. Her focus for 20 years has been drawing attention to ways to address clinician burnout, system inefficiency, and patient safety problems. She is co-author of Preventing Physician Burnout: Curing the Chaos and Returning Joy to the Practice of Medicine, which was published in 2016. 

Her personal experience with burnout and her desire to support clinicians motivated her to become a certified coach three years ago. She now helps clinicians gain clarity on their goals, increase their bandwidth, overcome barriers, and improve their professional and personal lives.

Dr. Shannon attended Williams College, Jefferson Medical College, and Harvard University. She completed training in Internal Medicine at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston and practiced general internal medicine before making the shift to writing and coaching. 

This interview was suggested by Dr. Tam Tiet, a family physician at Sutter Health so thank you for the suggestion, Dr. Tiet. We’ve spoken in the past about burnout from the physician perspective, but what can health systems do in order to address burnout? That was the topic for today’s discussion. We discuss the importance of physician retention and how we can accomplish that, addressing gender and racial disparities in compensation, retention and promotion, and what all of this has to do with pebbles in shoes.   Today's sponsor is LocumStory. For more locum tenens information, www.financialresidency.com/locumstory is your final destination.