Dan Dworkis, MD PhD FACEP is the Chief Medical Officer at the Mission Critical Team Institute, a board-certified emergency physician, and an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC where he works at LAC+USC. He performed his emergency medicine residency with Harvard Medical School at the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency at Massachusetts General Hospital / Brigham Health, and holds an MD and PhD in molecular medicine from the Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Dworkis is the founder of The Emergency Mind Podcast , and the author of The Emergency Mind: Wiring Your Brain for Performance Under Pressure.
Questions We Asked:
- Why did you feel the need to create The Emergency Mind?
- Is poise under pressure a learned skill or innate?
- What are valuable skills you have learned creating The Emergency Mind?
- How does someone successfully improve through a performance loop?
- What are ways to decrease stress while performing procedures?
- How does the Emergency Mind address team dynamics?
- How do you build a well functioning solid team?
- How do you run a successful debrief?
- Advice for medical leaders under pressure?
- Book Suggestions?
Quotes & Ideas:
- Applying knowledge under pressure is a separate learned skill
- What happens when you are trying to intubate a patient and miss the first time? How do you recover and make the second attempt?
- Prepare-> Perform-> Recover-> Evolve
- “Create an environment that sets you up for success”
- Experiment and be a scientist of yourself: Build->measure->learn
- Exposing yourself to stressful scenarios outside of the hospital can help you build skills to help clinically
- Use self-talk to help yourself manage acute stress
- When debriefing, learn to separate outcome from performance. You can sometimes have a poor outcome with perfect performance and also a good outcome with poor performance.
- Debriefs can use outcome vs. performance on a 2x2 matrix.
- Never Waste Suffering. Both ours as providers and the patients.
- Harness the wisdom in the room around you
- Practice when you are outside of pressure and then slowly introduce it to stressful situations
Book Suggestions:
- Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel
- Sources of Power by Gary Klein
- “A Failure to Disagree” paper by both
- Ghosts of the Fireground by Peter Leschak
