But it was a session on basic tips to improve patient-satisfaction scores that gave her the most feedback.
“There are a lot of things you kind of instinctively know just as a human being as opposed to being a physician,” Dr. Nweke says. “It’s only polite that you shake the hand of the person you’re meeting and you smile at them, as opposed to being a grouch. But it’s interesting to hear what questions are asked in the patient surveys. While I was there, I actually sat thinking from a patient’s perspective: ‘What would I be looking for in my hospital?’ ”
Dr. Nweke admittedly felt a bit frustrated with some sessions, as she’d hoped to extract more advanced tips. However, she had no complaints about the networking opportunities. Everywhere she turned, she says, she had the chance to discuss ideas with new faces.
“I’ve randomly met people, introduced myself to people, and talked about different challenges,” she says. “For someone like me, it’s really very important because I’m at the bottom of the totem pole, so to speak, as far as leadership.”
One bit of practical advice Dr. Nweke learned from meeting someone was the idea of a medical records committee. One of her new contacts chairs such a committee, which prompted Dr. Nweke to check in with her hospital while the annual meeting was happening. Turns out, her hospital doesn’t have a similar committee. Yet.
“Maybe this might be something I could throw out there and say, ‘How about we do this or that?’ ” Dr. Nweke adds, “whatever it might be, little things that I could do to improve and add some value and worth to my program, and our relationship with the hospital.”
A Kid in a Candy Store
If Dr. Perkins ever becomes president of the society, HM11 will be why. A self-proclaimed lame-duck chief resident at Tallahassee Memorial’s Family Medicine Residency Program in Florida, she’d already signed her first contract as a hospitalist and starts the job in August. Yet she didn’t know about SHM or the annual meeting until shortly before it started, when a community physician mentioned it to her.
So she booked a room at a nearby hotel (the 1,551-room Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center having filled up early) and spent the last of her CME money on HM11. She had trouble picking out any specific tips she wanted to take home to her new practice, Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare Hospitalists Group, as she had so many.
She sat in a recruitment session just to have things to tell her new boss. She took feverish notes during a presentation on best practices in the ICU because she’ll be spending a lot of time there. And during a meet-and-greet pairing residents with potential mentors, she befriended Daniel Dressler, MD, MSc, SFHM, an SHM board member, HM11’s course director, and academic hospitalist heavyweight at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.
“It’s kind of like when you start any adventure, you don’t have everything laid out in a guidebook,” Dr. Perkins says. “You just kind of have to put your feet out there and start moving and hope to God that things fall into your lap sometimes. This conference kind of did. This is kind of my guidebook, this is my compass, this is what I can look to when I’m trying to figure out how to make my own path in the specialty.”