Start of transcript:
As I mentioned in the intro, my name is Sheneka, Dr Horne to some.
I’m a pediatrician. I have a degree in public health. I did a fellowship in global health. I’m the founder/ creator of The Blk Doctor.
Tell me why I didn’t know what it was going to be like to be an attending?
I’m an early career physician and I burned out. This could’ve happened in med school, definitely residency, sprinkling a little bit more in fellowship.
I really had to take time and exam and why. I also wanted to help others who feel the way I feel about the medical system. So being an attending did not stop my dissatisfaction with medicine.
I thought when I graduated fellowship, the tasks that took me away from the part of my career that I loved would end, right? I would get to make all the firm decisions on how many hours I was working. Definitely no nights and weekends. I would stand up to the disrespect from some of these other staff.
I would have more. More money for sure. More time, more autonomy, more influence. But the thing about starting from a place of burn out and already not being excited, when you end up in a job where you are trying to please everyone else you’re definitely not gonna be satisfied.
I felt like I needed to write notes so that risk management, legal, billing, (who are all these people), who all have different needs, and I wanted to write note so that they were happy. I needed to write notes during an appointment so I’m saving time but not during the appointment, so that the patient gets the eye contact that they interpret as feeling heard and understood. I needed to write prescriptions as soon as the patient walks out the door so when they go straight to the pharmacy they’re not waiting too long. But I needed to be quick about all of it that the next patient isn’t waiting too long, so that the nurses and the techs don’t think I’m slow and therefore incompetent. Because we have this fear in medicine that someone’s gonna think that we’re stupid, despite the fact that we’ve gotten as far as we have, which is evidence to the contrary.
I needed to write notes, quality notes, so that the next doctor who sees the patient has a good idea of what’s going on. But they can’t be too long cause ain’t nobody trying to read your long notes and they’ll think that you have no idea what pertinent positive is.
The thing is as an attending, I got more… more tasks, more responsibility and more dissatisfied.
When you’re that busy, you literally have no time to look up. Life just keeps life-ing and you’re stuck in this wheel with no time to analyze how to make any kind of grand change that would bring the kind of ease and free time and overall satisfaction that you want.
I just became this workhorse. I wanted to be a thought leader, changemaker. But I was just so busy and so tired.
And with all of this, you have this guilt. Guilt about not being home with your family, missing important events. When you are home, you're too tired. You’re guilty about not staying later work because you have bad feelings about your unfinished billing and your unfinished notes.
There’s so many ways that medicine can be better in order to positively affect our lives.
The only way to get to that change is to change our mindsets. Our mindsets have to shift. We cannot continue to willingly be the cog in the wheel, the perfect employee.
This podcast aims to tackle the mindset shifts that doctors need to make in order to assess their environment, to make solid changes, to collectively shift.
The reason the podcast is titled collective is because there’s really nothing that we cannot accomplish as a community. We need community.
When you hear other doctors talk; sometimes this baseline isolation in medicine is described. Where we’re in the spaces where no one looks like us and we’re alone in the room.
