The Practice Project: One Way to Use the Summer Months
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Any views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and/or participants and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy, or position of Wounds or HMP Global, their employees, and affiliates.
Dear Readers,
The summer brings most of us time that we may spend with family and a chance to take a week (or 2) to get away from the noble but daunting job of healing others, answering their questions, assuaging their anxieties. As we give each of our patients a little piece of ourselves, the summer gives us the opportunity to recharge. In the parts of the country where we have 4 seasons, the summer also brings us heat that rekindles maladies made worse by increased humidity: venous stasis disease, lymphedema, etc. In these cases, we often see patients that we have not seen since we helped heal them the previous fall. We need to accommodate our patients’ summer plans. Many grandparents want to attend graduations, parents want to attend weddings, and all these activities of our patients lives “get in the way” of our medical plans for them.
For those of us in academic medicine, we say farewell to people we have trained for a year or years. We take on new trainees, restart and update our curricula, rethink our teaching methods and introduce these engaged and enthusiastic young people to our staff(s) and institution. The cadence of national meetings slows down for the summer, even the usual staccato of hospital, practice, and facility meetings lessens as the summer makes way for us, and the administrators of our world, to “be away.” While industry has the same research and development asks (but fewer educational asks), clinical trials strive to maintain the pace of enrollment, even as
patient-subjects wish to spend time away.
During the summer, many of us take on a property project or try to check a particular trip off our bucket lists. It may also be a good time to take a moment to step back from our practices to reflect on what we do and how we do it. To consider what we can do better and where we can streamline our care. How we can take care of the patients and their families that entrust their health to us. Exit interviews of outgoing fellows and residents starts as a focus; the collection of these unbiased opinions and observations acts a nidus of ideas and efficiencies, sometimes helping the patients to balance expectations with biologic realities. I look at these resets as taking on a “practice project.” These can be large or small projects, but it does take the time that “summer” may otherwise give us to step away, reflect, inspect, identify, and improve an aspect of our practice of wound medicine. Once we identify the improvement strategy and process, we can attempt to implement in the “quiet month” of August and have the new process or practice ready to roll in the month of September.
We at WOUNDS wish you a rejuvenating summer personally and professionally.
