New ‘Top Docs’ addresses health care workforce wellness & resilience
The latest edition of the Medical Association of Georgia’s (MAG) ‘Top Docs’ show addresses ways to promote wellness and resilience within the health care workforce – and it features Keisha Callins, M.D., M.P.H., who is an OB-GYN with Community Health Care Systems in central Georgia and the chair of MAG’ Physician Resilience Task Force, and Tim Cunningham, R.N., DrPH, FAAN, who is the vice president of practice and innovation for Emory Healthcare.
They discuss…
– How to recognize and define resilience
– The concepts of “self-care” and “narrative medicine”
– The benefits associated with resilience, and if it can be measured
– Whether resilience is an individual or practice/system responsibility
– How COVID-19 has altered efforts to address wellness and resilience
– What kinds of issues frontline health care workers have dealt with during the pandemic
– The resources that are available to help health care workers
– The MAG Physician Resilience Task Force’s mission and deliverables
– What Emory, the Georgia Nurses Association, and other allied groups are doing to promote resilience
– Examples of ways to promote or achieve resilience in a health care setting
Dr. Callins also serves as a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Community Medicine at the Mercer University School of Medicine in Macon, where she recently received the ‘Joy McCann Professorship’ to “expand her leadership and mentoring with women in medicine.” She has a medical degree from the Morehouse School of Medicine, she is a graduate of the MAG Foundation’s Georgia Physicians Leadership Academy, she has served on the Georgia Composite Medical Board’s Wellness Committee from 2014-2018, and she is a member of the Bibb County Medical Society.
Dr. Cunningham is an emergency/trauma nurse and the head of nursing education and professional development at Emory. His doctoral research focused on caregiver wellbeing in humanitarian settings – and that work has “inspired a career of research on resilience and compassion for nurses and physicians.” He has worked at the UVA Health System, the Children’s National Medical Center, and New York Presbyterian/Cornell in both adult and pediatric emergency. It is also worth noting that Dr. Cunningham has worked as a clinician in post-earthquake Haiti, Sierra Leone, during the Ebola outbreak (Partners in Health), and caring for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.
In 2018, Dr. Callins and John S. Antalis, M.D., with the Whitfield-Murray County Medical Society introduced a resolution that was approved by MAG’s Board of Directors that resulted in MAG’s first initiative to address physician burnout and wellbeing, which led to the formation of the MAG Physician Resilience Task Force. The goal of the task force is to “prioritize physician wellbeing, address burnout, and promote physician resilience.”
MAG members can contact Lori Cassity Murphy at lmurphy@mag.org with questions about the MAG Physician Resilience Task Force.
Between downloads and live listeners, ‘Top Docs’ has now reached more than 1.4 million listeners and viewers – which includes people in all 50 states and more than 80 countries. MAG has won two awards for the show, including an American Association of Medical Society Executives Profiles of Excellence Award and a Health Information Resource Center Digital Health Award.
‘Top Docs’ is supported with a grant from Alliant Health Solutions in memory of Tom Williams, its former CEO.
Resources
The views of the guests who appear on ‘Top Docs’ are theirs and are not necessarily consistent with MAG’s policies or positions. Contact Tom Kornegay at tkornegay@mag.org with questions about MAG’s ‘Top Docs’ show.
