Vital Conversations: Influencing Workplace Well-Being in Health Care
Let’s face it — working in health care is rewarding, but it can also be very hard. The Johns Hopkins Medicine Vital Conversations podcast explores the many factors that affect workplace well-being in health care. We take on complex topics through engaging conversations with thought leaders, bringing a range of perspectives and approaches to making work better. Whether you are a health care executive, front-line manager, clinician, researcher or a patient, we invite you to be part of this well-being journey.
Meet the Hosts
Episodes
New episodes are released monthly.
Kale and Yoga Won't Fix This: The Need for a Systems-Change Approach to Workplace Well-Being
Most of us know what it feels like when our well-being at work is compromised. But do we know how we got there? Is it just that it’s been a tough week or we didn’t have time for yoga, or is there something much deeper about working in health care at play? Today, we’ll take our first look at the things that really influence our well-being at work.
Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Podcasts
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Lee Daugherty Biddison, M.D., M.P.H.
Chief Wellness Officer
Johns Hopkins MedicineCarolyn Cumpsty Fowler, Ph.D., M.P.H.
Senior Director for Nursing Well-Being
Johns Hopkins Health System -
- Self-care is important for well-being, but focusing on individual behaviors will never be enough to improve our well-being at work.
- Because well-being is foundational to our ability to achieve what we care about (safety, quality, professional fulfillment, etc.), we must prioritize it.
- As with anything we care about, there are few quick fixes, but we do have guidelines and an emerging evidence base to help us move forward. We need to lean into a growth mindset, pace ourselves and realize that good things take time.
Are You Paying Attention?:
How We Can Use Our Focus to Reduce Cognitive Load in Support of Well-Being
Has the complexity of our work in health care outpaced our brain’s ability to keep up? Dr. Liz Harry, Chief Well-Being Officer at Michigan Medicine, discusses the connection between cognitive load and burnout, and introduces the concept of the attention economy. Dr. Harry shares strategies for leveraging technology while supporting our well-being, as well as some personal tips for protecting what has become a scarce resource — our focused attention.
Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Podcasts
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Lee Daugherty Biddison, M.D., M.P.H.
Chief Wellness Officer
Johns Hopkins Medicine -
Elizabeth Harry, M.D., S.F.H.M.
Chief Well-Being Officer
Michigan Medicine -
- Solving for burnout at the organizational level can feel overwhelming. Let’s not go it alone. We can learn from each other within health care and also from disciplines outside of health care. We need not only an individual growth mindset, but a collective growth mindset across health care.
- We now live in an attention economy — our attention is a scarce and valuable resource. We need to be intentional about where we choose to place our focused energy.
- As we lean into the power of AI, it’s important to consider how the technology is contributing to our well-being. Is AI reducing the number of clicks, steps or human interactions needed to complete a given task? In doing so, is it freeing up cognitive bandwidth for complex medical decision-making?
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Lightening the Load: Strategies to Reduce Cognitive Stress in Clinical Practice
Delivering health care is high stakes, but we too often don’t protect our attention and let in too many distractions. In this podcast, Dr. Liz Harry, Chief Well-Being Officer at Michigan Medicine, argues that we make things harder by enabling systems that add to our cognitive load. Dr. Harry helps us understand how cognitive load affects clinical care, gives tips on reducing our load and describes what a true cognitive break looks like.
Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Podcasts
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Carolyn Cumpsty Fowler, Ph.D., M.P.H
Senior Director for Nursing Well-Being
Johns Hopkins Health System -
Elizabeth Harry, M.D., S.F.H.M.
Chief Well-Being Officer
Michigan Medicine -
- Overload is associated with burnout, and our risk of overload increases as the amount of data coming at us increases.
- Organizations seeking to address burnout can look at interventions that affect extrinsic load, such as instituting standardization, reducing redundancy and ensuring that clinicians are not forced to split their attention.
- It’s important to be patient with our early career doctors, nurses and other clinicians, who are experiencing especially heavy cognitive load because they are building new mental models while gaining experience.
- Cognitive overload shows up in our work and in our home lives. Practical tips for reducing cognitive load: Standardize and set routines, protect our attention by limiting interruptions and prioritize focused attention on the things and people that matter most.
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