For Daniel Dressler, MD, medical director of the Hospital Medicine Group at Emory Healthcare in Atlanta, Ga., hospital medicine can be a juggling act—as can his committee work for SHM—although he is able to conduct some business from home. “When we do the conference calls for SHM, half of the time I’m home taking care of our kids”—one-year-old twins—often with one of them in his lap.
Dr. Dressler and his wife had been building a new home and working closely with contractors and subcontractors when she discovered she was pregnant last year. The construction project experienced multiple delays. When interviewed in September, the Dresslers were living temporarily with his in-laws and hoping the house would be completed within another month. His wife, a physical therapist, was not working but was looking forward to returning to work.
Dr. Dressler estimates that he puts in a 60-hour workweek, including 30 hours of hospitalist shifts and the rest administrative, teaching, and education. “I don’t recommend building a new house and having kids at the same time,” he says. “Taking care of one-year-old twins is more difficult than anything I do at work. But we have a good time.”
He also tries to squeeze in a basketball game with the medical residents every weekend.
Dr. Dressler’s schedule demands reflect an additional wrinkle in terms of juggling work and family—especially in a relatively new field with huge growth opportunities and an emphasis on changing the healthcare system. Doctors must balance what is truly required to perform the job and satisfy their employers with what they do to satisfy their own standards and expectations, as well as take advantage of opportunities to advance their careers.
“There’s the balance of what’s reasonable for you at this point in your career. It’s a personal decision for everyone—[deciding] what is an adequate amount of time for each of the priorities in your life … what drives you, and what makes you happy in your life,” says Dr. Dressler. “The things that drive me include teaching and advancing the field, which means seizing opportunities to grow with this new and growing field, but hopefully not to the detriment of the rest of my life.”
—Lisa Kettering, MD, medical director, Exempla-St. Joseph Hospital, Denver
A Family-Friendly Practice
Arpana Vidyarthi, MD, an academic hospitalist at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF), has responsibilities for teaching residents and medical students and additional roles in hospital quality and safety. “It’s a somewhat different role than a shift hospitalist, with different stressors,” she says. “But there are many options out there, and one of the things that makes being a hospitalist attractive to me is the flexibility it offers.”
Dr. Vidyarthi’s husband also has a demanding job. She is able to do some of her own work at home with her two-year-old daughter, Anaiya, but estimates that her nanny puts in a 50-hour week. “I came to UCSF to do a hospitalist fellowship, and this is exactly what I want to do, with tremendous job satisfaction and a varied schedule. Yet I feel stretched all the time,” she says.
Dr. Vidyarthi credits her group practice at UCSF and its head, Robert Wachter, MD, for a supportive and family-friendly working environment. Colleague Adrienne Green, MD, agrees, adding that three of the group’s 24 physician members are pregnant at this time.