#51 – Provider Wellness with Christine Hein, MD

This is one of my favorite podcasts that I’v recorded. If you’ve had the privilege of working with or getting to know Dr Christine Hein, MD, – or once you listen to this podcast – you’ll know why! Christine Hein, MD is an emergency medicine physician and the Chief Wellness Officer at Maine Medical Center, Maine’s only level 1 trauma center and academic teaching hospital. We recorded this episode in August of 2017 when Dr Hein was developing the Provider Well-being and Peer Support program at MMC. Since that time, the well-being program has grown substantially with continued support from the medical center and numerous volunteers. Maine Medical Center made a substantial statement of supporting provider wellness by establishing the Chief Wellness Officer position and Dr Hein was selected to serve as the first Chief Wellness Officer. She’s in the trenches as an emergency medicine physician and actively engaged in resident education. She’s an absolute master at all things related to provider wellness, a wife and mother of 5 kids and an elite distance runner. She has somehow found a way in her professional life to maintain a since of joy & optimism that is truly authentic and infectious. It’s like she walks around just spilling joy everywhere; she’s like an overflowing glass of water just sloshing a refreshing positive vibe wherever she goes, leaving the rest of us better off for having interacted with her. Yet that vibe is not some shallow surface level corporate smile campaign. With Christine, it’s actually rooted deep in a career as an emergency medicine provider and as a proficient healthcare leader & administrator. She’s someone who’s been in the arena, with her face mared by dust & sweat & blood*, to borrow from Theodore Roosevelt’s speech. And it’s from her personal story as an emergency medicine physician and from some dark places in her personal life – which she talks about in this episode – that she’s developed this deep desire to improve the lives of other healthcare providers around her through her work on provider wellness. So all that comes through in this episode. That’s who were talking to today. You’re going to love it. And not only that, but we also had the immense pleasure of being joined for this discussion by Dr Hein’s daughter, Ms Abby Irish. This is the first time that a guest has brought one of their children along to a podcast recording and that, again, speaks to how important this topic is to Dr Hein and one of the reasons why I love this episode. At the time of this recording Abby was an 8th grader who was interested in becoming a physician. She had just finished surgery summer camp in Boston and talks about her experience at the start of the show. We run the gamut of provider wellness in this conversation. We discuss burnout, wellness, resiliency, organizational drivers of burnout and ways hospitals, med schools & anesthesia programs can build structural components to eliminate burnout and foster well-being. We talk about peer support & how that’s different than professional counseling. We touch on substance abuse, suicide and the stigma of mental health concerns and getting help & support. We share personal stories from our careers and those of others that bring these concepts to life and give them real traction. As healthcare providers, we spend an incredible amount of time, energy and money becoming highly qualified in our fields yet rarely create space for deliberately developing a sense of well-being in our professional and personal lives. We should remember that as health is more than the absence of disease, joy in work is more than the absence of burnout.