In this episode of the JoyMed Podcast, Melina is joined by Dr. Art Saavedra, Dean of VCU School of Medicine. Dr. Saavedra and Melina explore the critical issue of burnout in medical training and beyond. They discuss the root causes of burnout and how medical schools can address them through stress management and well-being education. Join us as we examine how institutions can reshape curricula and foster healthier environments for healthcare professionals throughout their careers.
Melina Davis: Welcome to Joymed Podcast. My name is Melina Davis, I’m your host. I’m the executive vice president and CEO for The Medical Society of Virginia and we’re pleased today. Lucky to have Dr. Art Saavedra, who is not only dean of the VCU Virginia Commonwealth School of Medicine, he’s also the executive vice president of VCU Health and we are lucky enough that he’s a board member, as well, for the Medical Society of Virginia. Art, welcome and we’re so pleased you’re here. Thank you for joining us.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Thank you for having me. It’s really a pleasure.
Melina Davis: You and I have known each other for a couple of years now and I have to say, that for people who don’t know you, it’s a gift to be around you. You just have such energy and such positivity and you’re a solutions-oriented person, wouldn’t you say?
Dr. Art Saavedra: Well, thank you for saying that. You know, I have to say that we are all just so happy with the jobs we have in many ways. You know, there are only 158 medical schools in this country and I get to be the dean for one of them so I should smile every day.
Melina Davis: It’s such a gift and you really enjoy working with students, right? My sense is when you’re around them, you already are so uplifting, but then I see, I can physically see you lift in a room with these young people.
Dr. Art Saavedra: When I tell you our own incoming President, Doctor Bundy calls me Papa Dean.
Melina Davis: Papa Dean!
Dr. Art Saavedra: That’s right. We were actually at the resolution session at the House of Delegates at the MSV. I was sitting up in front of the room while one of our own medical students came to argue a position and I just looked at him thinking how lucky are we that we have this talent and coming up in medicine and I get to watch it all develop and unfold?
So yes, I was wearing my very proud Papa Dean face entire in that episode. Yes.
Melina Davis: Yeah. I love this and I’ll just say in our annual meeting for the Medical Society this year, you had a record number of applicants for our Salute to Service awards from students and from faculty, as well. I think the committee was really overwhelmed by how many incredible applicants there were from VCU and you encouraged a lot of that.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Absolutely. I think that part of the Joy in Medicine and what we have to do when we educate students is to really remind everyone that it is a privilege to be in this position. And Salute to service means exactly that. Why shouldn’t we be proud that we’ve chosen a life to make others healthier and to be part of the betterment of society?
Melina Davis: One thing that strikes me so much about working with physicians and DOs, MDs, anybody who’s decided to go into medicine honestly is that it’s a very service-oriented calling. And that I’m not even sure people understand, I think there is some cynicism in today’s world of healthcare that it’s about money, but in my experience it’s about service and that it is a calling. I see that in today’s folks. Was it that way when you entered medical school?
Dr. Art Saavedra: I think it’s always been a calling, for sure. I think we’ve had to adjust to the various pressures in society, whether they’d be social, political, financial. But it’s all – the common denominator is always to focus on someone else and to focus on systems.
I would say that maybe 20 years ago we were still really thinking about concepts and learning and basic science, which we still do, but in the last two decades, we further refined the concept of how all that comes across in a system.
How we interact with other specialties, how we interact with other scopes of practice, and if I have to be really thoughtful about training to that as well.
Melina Davis: So interesting.
Dr. Art Saavedra: You see, it’s not just knowing what antibiotic to use for an infection, it’s knowing how to interact with nurses who call about the positive blood culture. Interacting with the pharmacy about expense. It’s interacting with insurers about whether the correct antibiotic is actually covered.
So we really have to start training people to think of systems. What role you play in and interestingly how you perfect that system to the ultimate goal of care.
Melina Davis: Which is a very different kind of training. How is today’s training on a daily basis. What are one or two things that are significantly different about the way you train students today? Specifically, as compared to how you were trained?
Dr. Art Saavedra: Oh, I love that question. I was in fact thinking about that the other day. You see about 80% of the material we teach today I never learned in medical school.
Melina Davis: Wow.
Dr. Art Saavedra: It’s just new content, but in addition to that we are teaching it differently. Let me tell you what medical school was like in the early ‘90s.
Melina Davis: Yeah?
Dr. Art Saavedra: You got into medical school, you bought your books, you came to the classroom, class started at 8:00 in the morning. It was done at 5:00 PM with a short break for lunch, and then you went to the library and did some reading. You listened to a professor.
Melina Davis: Mm.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Often brilliant minds, and in fact, they sat there with enamored eyes that I could even learn from these people. See, now we know that we have to not just listen to those refined minds. We have to get medical students together to teach one another.
Melina Davis: Right.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Because you see, it’s not just about listening and understanding. It’s about learning to commit and communicate that knowledge to someone else. So we now find that education is at its peak when people teach one another.
Melina Davis: Well, and adult learning, we’ve learned a lot about how adults learn, and interactive learning is how we integrate that learning. We’ve learned that that is a best practice. I love to hear that’s part of medical school. How do you think that affects how capable they are and how ready they are when they finish?
Dr. Art Saavedra: I think it makes you an entirely different professional. Let me tell you why – it probably should always have been the case, but it is more so now that we have to really engage with patients and their families, often in communicating very sophisticated information. Maybe we once thought, well, maybe we just glance on the surface of these concepts because after all these patients aren’t trained in medicine.
But now we know that’s not the right approach. We have to figure out ways of communicating these complicated concepts with those who may understand science and those who may not, because that therapeutic affiliation doesn’t end in the hospital. It continues at home.
So, making sure that people really understand. What is your disease? How are we going to treat it? But more importantly, how do we prevent it, if that is possible? And so teaching medical students to speak to one another when they’re very early in their career also teaches them the humility of simplifying concepts that they need to instead pass on to patients.
Melina Davis: So many questions from that statement. So, medicine and diagnostics today much more complex. What people are contending with is more complex than ever, and we know more so it gets – it’s harder to do it now than it would have been before, and it’s effectively a new skill, newer skill, in medicine, would you agree?
Dr. Art Saavedra: That is correct. And you know, it’s a new skill, not just because of the concepts, but let me introduce a sexy topic, right. The technology available.
Melina Davis: Yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Should we be fearing the web?
Melina Davis: Yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: There is information and disinformation, but there are some good elements and patients are going to be in there. Should we fear artificial or augmented intelligence, right?
Melina Davis: Yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: And so, the concepts are not just around basic science and clinical medicine, it’s about integration. It’s about understanding how to put things together.
Melina Davis: Yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: It’s understanding how patients may understand or misunderstand what you say, and technology has a role. It will never replace us. It has a role, so we have to teach students to use the tools but to also understand the potential pitfalls and the biases of such tools.
Melina Davis: It strikes me that what you’re talking about these concepts of learning are very similar to the kind that I learned growing up. I have everything except biology, chemistry, and medicine in my background. I’ve skipped all those classes. But what I will say is I had deep leadership training, deep team-based training, a lot of group work. And so, I came up on the International Studies and Business School side. It sounds like a very similar model.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Absolutely. You know, when I think back about my education, I’m simply just grateful for everyone who taught me. But I’ve also been equally fascinated by the knowledge and skill sets of accrued overtime after medical school.
And one of them was leadership. I very early on decided to get an MBA and not because I wanted to go raise a fund or learn how to do sophisticated financial modeling. But it was for the for this very reason, which I hope to teach medical school. Students, often we think of health as something that has a recipe to it, and often we are taught to take no risk because deviating standard of care could cause harm. And we have to value quality and safety, and we always will.
Dr. Art Saavedra: But we also have to understand that patients don’t fit moles.
Melina Davis: Right. We’re human, not robots. Yeah.
Dr. Art Saavedra: And we are human, not robots, right? So, as you start tailoring that treatment that’s specific for a patient we often encounter this internal fear that we may be incurring risk.
Whereas in medical school you used to teach don’t take risks, in business school we teach how to mitigate risk.
Melina Davis: Right. How to mitigate and manage. That’s right.
Dr. Art Saavedra: And bring that into medical education is going to be very important as we really start honoring personalized medicine. We don’t fit protocols. We fit standards of care and the social determinants of health that surround each patient.
Melina Davis: Yes. Right. That’s right. So interesting. I love this and it does require skill sets from two sides of the brain.
Dr. Art Saavedra: That’s right.
Melina Davis: Not just one side like me, where we really get to concentrate on the people end of it and the business end, but also the science and analytical side, it requires a lot of somebody to be able to think and analyze and diagnose and go deep. And remember all of that information, but then also relate and communicate and lead. That’s a lot of pressure.
Dr. Art Saavedra: You know, I think it is pressure, but it is important for us to honor the care of patients. Let me tell you this little secret that parents often wonder about. They think, well, if my kid is interested in medical school, how do I best prepare them to be successful, do they need to major in science? Does it need to be hard science? And yes, we do admit students that major in biochemistry and organic chemistry, and biology. But we admit students that after satisfying the basic pre-medical requirements have majored in English.
Melina Davis: Wow. Wow.
Dr. Art Saavedra: And anthropology and history. And that’s because in medicine, who we really want in our classrooms, we really want leading the future and taking care of patients, is humanists with a propensity for science, so think about that.
Melina Davis: Yes. Yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: The very core of who we want is a humanist. Someone who could, yes, understand complicated concepts of medicine and could look for information that they don’t know and is a self-educator. But we need people ultimately who are centered around the human experience and what it is to be vulnerable and sick.
Melina Davis: Right. Because these are our most vulnerable moments when we’re in the hospital or with a doctor, there’s no doubt. Both either in terms of we’re not well or a loved one’s not well and we’re scared.
Or frankly, we have to talk about things that are uncomfortable with somebody who we respect but maybe aren’t, you know, in a very intimate relationship with, it’s a vulnerable moment and relationship. You have to trust that this person is going to see you as a human and its what patients want from my experience.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Well, not only do we want to be seen as humans, but we want to make sure that as we enter the most telling moments of our life, we can trust someone with those questions that we may not trust everyone with, for example. It is an enormous privilege to have a patient ask what’s going to happen to my family if I am not OK.
Melina Davis: Yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: How do I speak to my spouse? God, imagine about a child who is very ill and that’s not just a privilege for a doctor, that’s a responsibility. And as a doctor, I can tell you that the greatest lessons in humanity have come from patients, not from the classroom because you realize that at any moment you could become that patient and in one snap your life changed.
Melina Davis: Yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: So, in respect for yourself, you have to really learn from others about what their experience is and how to help them along through the entire journey.
Melina Davis: You know, I think people don’t really understand sometimes unless they’ve been in this situation the weight of leadership. Sometimes it’s easy to lose sleep from making hard choices or having hard conversations, or that you leave work, and you carry that home with you. We have a tendency to not think about people and healthcare doctors. In particular, carrying that home, I don’t know why we as patients sort of believe you all are impervious in many ways to the human stickiness of work.
Dr. Art Saavedra: You know, I think it’s ultimately, again this incredible respect that society has for what doctors do and the training they undertake. And I see it from the perspective of these are great men and women , who are very intelligent and it all comes from a place of respect, but the reality is that all great men and women have challenging moments as well.
Melina Davis: That’s right.
Dr. Art Saavedra: You know, moments that are not immune to the human experience, like illness, like family distress, like financial trouble. And you know, I will tell you that many years ago, I was part of a trial looking at the physician experience and determinants of burnout, specifically and what we learned through that study was that it was often the very high performers, those that we would never guess are struggling, that suffer the most because they can take and take and take.
Melina Davis: Yes. Mm. Yeah.
Dr. Art Saavedra: And absorb and perform with very little recognition, by themselves or others, that in fact they are struggling, and they need help.
Melina Davis: Well, and we do have this thing in high achievers where we believe we can keep going because we always have. But it is natural, and we see it in firefighters, we see it in, in veterans, we see it in others. There’s a wall we all hit. We are not superhuman to the point we’re never affected, or it doesn’t build up where it’s too weighty, or that we need help. That’s a weird thing to have to experience, but usually, it’s typically as you’re still trying to achieve and still climbing up, right?
Dr. Art Saavedra: Yes, you know, and sometimes medicine actually has answers for us in places that we don’t recognize. Let me get geeky on you for a little bit.
Melina Davis: Please.
Dr. Art Saavedra: We all know the heart, right? A vital organ.
Melina Davis: Yes, yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: And it squeezes so hard and pumps blood through the entire body, it keeps us alive.
Melina Davis: Yeah.
Dr. Art Saavedra: But this organ that keeps us alive while pumping oxygen to everyone else only feeds itself during the moment of relaxation, called diastole. It pushes hard and it feeds everyone else, but then it must relax and expand to feed itself.
Melina Davis: Yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: It is no different for a doctor or any member of the healthcare team. You go through this incredible effort to pump energy and health and knowledge and love to the patient. But there has to be a period of rest, of self-care, and really that’s how we thrive so that we can help others. And when we forget that that is necessary or when we forget that doctors are human, or when we forget that it is important to regroup. Which was changing, really the health of others, because we’re bringing someone into the care team as a leader who is not healthy himself or herself.
Melina Davis: Right. Right, and is only feeding others not taking that rest moment.
Dr. Art Saavedra: That’s right.
Melina Davis: You know, I know doctors of all ages. We have 11,000 members in our state, and I think they range from, you know, their young 20s until some are 80-something! So, I’ve seen generations, and I’ve interacted with generations and there’s definitely a different expectation of whether you can take a rest or whether you can admit that you need something as a doctor in these generations. How do you think we’re better preparing young doctors today than we have say a few generations even beyond you?
Dr. Art Saavedra: That’s a great question and it has a simple answer. Talking about it. We didn’t used to talk about it before. It was a secret. It was a bit of a shameful thing to say: “Maybe I’m not at my best today.”
Now we lead front and center. It is not a reason to be ashamed. It’s why we have the resources that we currently have and, you know, I think that as there is a generational gap, and we understand that, and as we consider our differences it’s also important to highlight that we share commonalities.
Melina Davis: Yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: And that commonality is the love for patients.
Melina Davis: Mm.
Dr. Art Saavedra: But boy, when I hear comments like young people, maybe don’t want to work as hard or it is about work-life balance, I have to be honest with you, I have an allergic reaction to that.
Melina Davis: Good.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Because I was in that previous generation, and I can now see the complexity of care is just so much greater now. The advances in medicine are phenomenal. We send people home with catheters and medications that simply did not exist when I trained.
Melina Davis: Yeah.
Dr. Art Saavedra: You know, I will also say in jest and those listening may recall this time when we brought patients in for days for EKG and white blood cell measurements to determine whether they had a heart attack. Now we do it in the emergency room and the speed, volume, and complexity of care that young medical students, residents, and young doctors are facing is incredible. And add to the fact that we’re only bringing the best and the brightest into medical school. So how could we say that they are not working as hard? What I will say is that the environment around us all has just changed.
Melina Davis: It’s crazy.
Dr. Art Saavedra: It’s become complex and if we don’t adapt to that environment and consider how it affects training and well-being then shame on us for not doing so.
Melina Davis: Yeah. You know, I think this is a really great point and frankly, we don’t have enough conversation about this in my opinion. I, again, spend a lot of time around conversations between doctors and with doctors, and I don’t hear this point enough, do y’all understand what they’re dealing with compared to what we dealt with? Even just the pace of life, the volume of patients, and the expectation of the hospital or potential employer versus the autonomy of independent practice. All these things before you even get to medicine, add so much more pressure.
Dr. Art Saavedra: That’s right. And to be frank, it’s one of the reasons I really enjoy being in the Medical Society of Virginia because I have had one career.
Melina Davis: Aw.
Dr. Art Saavedra: I have been an academic physician my entire life, but I am training people that will go into all different types of careers. And that society allows me to, yes, talk to other Deans and to other academic doctors. But I also talk to people who live in communities, and they are the only doctor in their town.
Melina Davis: Right, right. Alone.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Some of them, even the mayor of that town. Right. And for me to witness the variety of the experience that doctors have really informs my ability to be a good dean and say this is the diversity of platform that I have to train medical students for.
Melina Davis: I love that. Do you see burnout already affecting students and why is that? I think that’s confusing to older doctors.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Yeah. I really like that question. Let me be frank I’m very sure and clear that burnout isn’t just affecting doctors and nurses and respiratory techs and health care workers. It’s affecting society in many ways. You know, we are at a period of information overload, constant attention, Internet, artificial intelligence, and news. It just doesn’t stop.
And there’s this concept of always being awake and on and let me be frank with you, even if you’re not going to medical school, I see students worried about taking the LSAT for law school and the MCAT for medical school and the right electives in first year of undergraduate education, they’re worried about doing the right research in the summer to get the right job. These students are facing pressures before they graduate high school. So, thinking that we are going to remedy this in medical school is not the entire answer, right? Do we bring these concepts through the entire educational cascade before medical school and after?
Melina Davis: Hmm.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Let me be frank, continuing medical education.
Melina Davis: Right, yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: We need to use that avenue to teach our doctors who are 65 and 70, right?
Melina Davis: Yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Because it can come at any time. So, I see this very much like I see quality and safety in a hospital. It is not a goal we need to check and we accomplish it and we’re done. It is process improvement and we do it all the time. All the time.
Melina Davis: Well, it’s part of the human condition at this stage of life, right? If we’re not doing it continuously, we’re ignoring the heart’s needs.
Dr. Art Saavedra: That’s right. And listen, I I’ll be frank with you. I think I am maybe an optimist, but I think the best is yet to come. When I welcome these medical students the first year when they’re sitting in the classroom getting their white coats for the first time, and I shake their hands on stage to welcome them into medical school.
Melina Davis: Yeah.
Dr. Art Saavedra: I think to some of the applications that I have read and these students are coming with incredible experiences and incredible dedication to society. Let me share an example with you to just make you so aware of the incredible people coming into medicine. I interviewed a medical student, now a medical student, who wondered after reading on the highway the sign “Superman had foster parents.”
Melina Davis: Oh, right, I saw that sign.
Dr. Art Saavedra: He was really interested in the concept of foster care and adoption and why it had only been defined in the context of children, and I was incredibly interested of what would come next. And this is what I heard. There are many elderly that face the end of their lives alone.
Melina Davis: Yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Whether because they were widowed, never married or had children, what we now call the single-aged patient, and he wondered, why wouldn’t we extend the concept of adoption and foster care?
Melina Davis: Yeah. I love this idea!
Dr. Art Saavedra: To an elderly patient, why wouldn’t we have families adopting a grandparent? And I am getting emotional telling you this, because what person thinks of this, right?
Melina Davis: Yes. An extraordinary person.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Who does? A young, extraordinary medical student. So, we should smile and celebrate. The best is yet to come.
Melina Davis: Yes, yes. This is what always strikes me about the new class of students. You know, when we meet them, they are so excited to serve and to find solutions there.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Unbelievable.
Melina Davis: They really are. When do we start arming them in medical education to manage burnout with themselves and with patients? Do we teach both sides and when does it start?
Dr. Art Saavedra: Oh, absolutely. So, starting year one, we talk about our curriculum. We talk about how we teach the curriculum and then we talk about the periods of rest. So now we teach organ systems. So, we start for example, with cardiovascular physiology and then at points of that organ system, we have afternoons for self-directed learning and we have afternoons also for self-care.
Melina Davis: Great.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Are they enough? No. The magic is speaking with the medical students and saying: Is this enough? Is this the right form? How do we do it better? And what we’re really learning, for example, is that often we don’t need to have every lecture be required, for instance, or that every lecture be witnessed in person. We can tape lectures, we could make materials accessible, and styles of learning are different because you see this is what I think the magic is behind burnout.
We all work hard and we are all willing to work even harder. But what feeds the soul is to have a certain ability to control our time. To control our destiny, and our autonomy, and if we can create some autonomy and learning styles and how we deliver the information, I think that’s one of the most important aspects of preventing burnout.
Melina Davis: That’s so smart.
[Music]You’re also an administrator in a very large hospital system in Virginia. Is there anything we should be doing similarly inside a system or a work environment that we’re not doing, or that we need to do more of?
Dr. Art Saavedra: Absolutely and they can be big items, and they can be simple, small items. You know, we have heard of the concept of the Chief Wellness Officer, for example.
Melina Davis: Yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: That leads to a strategic vision of we llness deployment in a system, if appropriate, with operational control and systems to make sure that we consider wellness in everything we do. That’s, for example, a big strategy, but there are small things that we should not underestimate being greatly impactful.
Melina Davis: Yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Let me give you an example. The surgical clerkship is a difficult time for medical students. It’s busy, you are introduced into just an incredible new language and culture. And let’s be frank, visual experiences that we have rarely encountered before doing surgery. And we learned early on that that was a difficult time for medical students.
Melina Davis: Right.
Dr. Art Saavedra: They were tired. Again, witnessing new things. And we thought really hard about how we could make the experience better. And let me tell you what turned out to make the greatest impact was to simply include, in the surgical obelisk, as you’re preparing the patient, cleaning the room, making sure that we have all the tools. We had one item that said “introduce yourself.”
Melina Davis: Oh.
Dr. Art Saavedra: To the medical student.
Melina Davis: Ah.
Dr. Art Saavedra: That made the greatest difference. What does that tell you? We all want to feel part of a team.
Melina Davis: That’s right. Welcome.
Dr. Art Saavedra: We all want to be acknowledged, and we want to be part of the experience and simply watching from a corner and thinking that that is an education is the wrong construct.
Melina Davis: Oh, that’s so smart. Because it really does invite them into the learning environment, but also all of a sudden makes them feel open. Maybe your hands aren’t in there, but you’re in the room with people versus you’re supposed to be invisible in the corner being silent.
Dr. Art Saavedra: That’s right.
Melina Davis: Pion, yeah.
Dr. Art Saavedra: That’s right. And you know, I’ll tell you that it really taught us a lot about the medical student experience. We are not teaching them. We are not lecturing at them. We are together, trying to figure out how we best teach together.
Melina Davis: One of the things and, and I know we’re going to wrap up here soon, but I’ll just stretch this out a bit longer ’cause I’m enjoying this so much!
One of the things I notice is how much that practicing doctors, particularly after they pass their mid-career, they get so much energy from interactions with medical students. This energy and one, I think it reminds them of when they began and they see themselves in the student, but I also think they are inspired by their energy and their hopefulness.
There is this exchange, this grace, and this giving between them that I really want to empower more of. I just- I’m not sure what my question is, but do you see it? And do you think it has power and what should we be doing to help that?
Dr. Art Saavedra:
Oh God, so much power. Let me tell you that when we select a medical school class, we rely on our community doctors and our alumni to interview students so that that interaction is absolutely necessary to, you know, recruit and admit the right candidates. But I see this energy from community physicians who want to be part of grant rounds in the department, right?
Melina Davis: Oh, yes, yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Who want to hear what’s new but also contribute by telling us what’s practical, right, what really happens out there. And I do think that the physician, no matter what specialty, leaves a legacy. And that legacy is in the care of patients, but in the sharing with the new workforce, what it is like to take care of patients.
I, for one, don’t have children and when I think of my own legacy, I smile thinking that in some small way, 189 students graduate every year, having watched me as dean.
Melina Davis: Yes.
Dr. Art Saavedra: And not necessarily sprouting off information, but behaving the way that doctors should by contributing to society, by being part of the advocacy. Machinery that is necessary for us to be better, but ultimately, how I choose to engage with others and treat them is the passive learning that I think any dean, any doctor can leave behind while inspiring young medical students.
Melina Davis: I love that. You know, I believe, too, that stigma remains something that, frankly, I’ve taken on as a personal mission to try to help get rid of in the profession. I do believe it’s like plaque buildup in the profession.
How do we get rid of the stigma around talking and around dealing with your humanness and allowing yourselves to be healthy and giving you way, right, to make more room for that flow and that health. I’m taking it on because I just think somebody needs to help you all, sort of, clean out the pipes, so to speak.
Dr. Art Saavedra: I think it starts with all of us, you know, I think other careers have found a great way of showing this is where I struggled in getting through it in the right way has allowed me to accomplish this. Look at where I am, right? We see that all the time in engineering, and God, in business, right? People talk about how all the failures.
Melina Davis: Yes, it’s OK!
Dr. Art Saavedra: And all the failed starts. That’s how I got here!
Melina Davis: That’s right.
Dr. Art Saavedra: That’s how I made it big.
Melina Davis: No, it’s right.
Dr. Art Saavedra: And we don’t do that as doctors and I will tell you that in my first meeting with medical students, every year I make it a point to get a little personal because it is important for them to see me and other doctors as humans with all our built-in fallibilities and successes and failures and one medical student specifically pushed further and asked me “Can you share with me a time you truly, truly, truly struggled?” and I could have been so-called wishy-washy but I went to the dark place.
And I said there was a time in my career when one parent needed a transplant, the other was ill and I was getting a divorce.
Melina Davis: Oh, goodness, that’s a hard moment.
Dr. Art Saavedra: And this is how I got through it. And it was friends and mentors and God, people who I didn’t even know, who by comporting in a certain way, inspired me to get through, right? And what I am trying to tell them with that statement isn’t that something awful will happen in your life. Quite the opposite. What I’m saying with that statement is if it does, there’s a community around you. There are resources and you too can succeed. You too can be a dean. You too can be a community doctor that advocates for the community because you’re healing and your own experience is the best training to get things done.
Melina Davis: I love this. It sounds like we’re on a shared path to make it safer and more empowering to be human in medicine.
Dr. Art Saavedra: That’s correct.
Melina Davis: Yes. And I believe it’ll make our patients healthier and our families and our communities healthier.
Dr. Art Saavedra: It’s necessary, and without it, we are just not acknowledging that taking care of others begins with taking care of yourself, as well.
Melina Davis: I love that. I’ve so enjoyed this time with you. Thank you so much for just taking time out of your morning to spend with us and talk. I’m grateful to know you, and I’m grateful for this time.
Dr. Art Saavedra: Well, I thank you for the opportunity and for your leadership in getting us all together and helping us have the difficult conversations. Thank you.
Melina Davis: Thank you for listening to JoyMed podcast series. I think you’ll find it very interesting and compelling all dedicated to making our healthcare workforce healthier, come back and hear us soon.