Dr. Green’s children are very interested in her work and have visited her at the hospital, which makes the work more real to them. “I’ll tell them about some of my patients who are really sick, and I’ll explain that the reason I’m going to work on the weekend is that I’m helping people get better and get out of the hospital,” says Dr. Green. “When I’m working on a Saturday and my son has a baseball game, I’ll tell him I’ll try to get to the game, but I can’t promise. But when we do have family time, we make it quality time.”
Dr. Wachter explains how he promotes a family-friendly work environment for hospitalists at UCSF: “My overarching management philosophy is that the quality of our program is equal to the quality of the people we’re able to recruit and retain. Thus, an environment that is professionally satisfying, collegiate, fun, and supportive of everyone’s personal and family goals is fundamental.”
Balancing life and work requires some give and take among the members of the group, who cover for each other when needed. It also takes a commitment to staffing in anticipation of predictable future needs for maternity leaves, sabbaticals and the like, rather than waiting for the actual need to arrive.
—Lisa Kettering, MD, medical director, Exempla-St. Joseph Hospital, Denver
Making Good Career Choices
Lisa Kettering, MD, a member of SHM’s Board of Directors, has been a working hospitalist since 1998. Before that she worked in a traditional internal medicine practice. She also believes that hospital medicine offers more flexibility and opportunities for balance, with a full-time hospitalist position roughly comparable to the “part-time” private practice position she once held.
“In private practice, you’re always coming back to phone calls and piles of charts,” says Dr. Kettering. “As a hospitalist, you take care of your business in real time, instead of always playing catch up.”
A year ago, Dr. Kettering assumed medical direction of a practice of nine hospitalists and three intensivists at Exempla-St. Joseph Hospital in Denver, Colo., a position that includes significant clinical duties and requires about 80 hours of her time per week.
“If my children [three sons age 21, 19, and 16] were not almost grown, I could not have accepted this position,” she says. “But this job is my passion. For me, the key to family balance has been a supportive spouse and lots of child care and other supports.”
Dr. Kettering’s sons were born just before or during her medical school and residency, so her long hours have always been part of the equation. “What I gave up [for this career] were aspects of a social life, such as dinners out with our friends and an opportunity to work on my tennis game” and similar hobbies, she says. She has continued to run, a time-efficient form of exercise and stress management. Now that her children are leaving home, there is more time to indulge a love of yoga and Pilates and to resume a more normal social life—although she doesn’t do much cooking.
Don’t be shy about getting help, Dr. Kettering advises. She engages a personal assistant eight hours a week to help with errands such as making travel arrangements, picking up groceries, taking the car in for servicing, or wrapping the birthday presents she buys. “Not that I couldn’t squeeze in a few errands on the way home from work, but it would just be more demands on my time,” she explains.