If you are a medical professional or speak to a medical professional, a common theme emerges. No matter your specialty or position, most people have experienced doing more with fewer resources.
This could mean fewer doctors or mid-levels seeing more patients, or fewer nurses working with more doctors. It could mean fewer ancillary and support staff with equal or greater responsibilities, and the list goes on and on.
As a high achieving woman professional, the natural tendency is to absorb the additional work yourself and not ask for help.
You may think that asking for help is a sign of weakness or may be perceived as a sign of weakness.
You may not want to burden anyone else or feel guilt for adding on to anyone else’s already full plate.
You may believe that it’s easier or faster to just do the work yourself.
But you may be very wrong.
Your beliefs may sound nice, but they are leading you to take actions that are keeping you overworked and overwhelmed.
Mindful Doc Mom
While these beliefs sound very nice in theory, in reality they are leading you to take actions that are keeping you overworked and overwhelmed.
Every time you choose to do a task that someone else could do instead of a task that only you can do, you are paying a price with time.
Mindful Doc Mom
Every time you choose to do a task that someone else could do instead of a task that only you can do, you are paying a price with time.
The task that only you could do is not going away. You will have to do it anyway, and now you will have to do it later. That later may be at the end of clinic, but more likely at night or on the weekend.
Is the cost worthwhile?
This happened to me recently in my clinic. One of my nurses who used to help me with a particular patient device switched departments. These particular visits went faster when she was there, so now I was left to do the device on my own. This already added time to the visit, but in addition, the location of the device was in a room at the other end of the clinic and now I had to walk to the room and get the device anytime a patient needed it.
It didn’t even occur to me to ask for help; that’s how conditioned I was to take on additional work myself.
Then one day I saw the medical assistants sitting at their desks and it dawned on me that I could ask them to help me by getting the device and bringing it to the room while I started the visit.
I still didn’t ask, at least not right away! I felt bad that they might think I was lazy or rude or taking advantage of them or acting like I was above them somehow.
But when I explored these thoughts (because I’m a coach, after all, and value self-awareness), I realized how silly they were and it was just as possible that they wouldn’t think any of these thoughts and my focus in this case should be on what is best for the patient. What was best was for the patient was for me to start the visit as soon as possible, try to stay efficient so clinic runs smoothly, and complete my visits the same day including closing all my charts.
That’s when I nicely turned to my staff and asked if they would please bring the device to the patient room. This has shaved minutes off these visits, which if you add up multiple visits over days, weeks, months, and years, you can imagine how much time this would save.
This is just one simple example, but there are several similar scenarios you can find in your own day where asking for help could save you and the patient time and help your day run smoother.
Once you identify the things you could ask others to help you with, see what thoughts come up for you.
Then, begin to question these thoughts.
Are they even true?
Could the opposite be just as true?
Is this thought serving you or not?
Is it serving your patients?
The answers to these questions might surprise you and lead you to take a different action that could save you precious time.
