Falling back in love with Emergency Medicine 2.0 with Dr Andrea Austin.

10/11/21 • 112 min

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In S2 E14 I am delighted to welcome Dr Andrea Austin MD, FACEP, FAAEM, CHSE to the podcast. Dr Austin is an Emergency Physician and Simulation educator based in Southern California. She graduated medical school from the University of Iowa and completed her emergency medicine residency at Naval Medical Center San Diego ( NMCSD) Dr Austin was the first female emergency physician to be stationed at Navy Trauma Training Center ( NTTC) at LA County + USC, one of the busiest trauma centers in the United States. As the emergency medicine physician and simulation director at NTTC, she trained hundreds of military medical personnel in the latest trauma advances to prepare them to provide medical care in austere environments. In 2016 she deployed to Iraq as part of a Shock Trauma Platoon. Andrea will also be familiar to many listeners as the co-host of The Emergency Mind podcast with previous guest Dr Dan Dworkis. Her voice has kept me and many anchored through this challenging time. Her most recent endeavour the Revitalize Women Physician Circle combines her experience with executive coaching, mentoring and leadership development.
Dr Austin makes active, meaningful contributions to a number of key areas of medical practice including medical simulation education and training, military medicine, veterans’ health, equity in medicine and female leadership, mentoring and advancing physician and healthcare worker wellbeing conversations and strategy.
In this conversation Andrea allows me to explore her professional and personal journey wearing these hats. This conversation spans simulation as teaching tool, female leadership, coaching and mentoring through finding her voice as a podcast host. Specifically, she reflects on her own experiences of career burnout, the role coaching has played in helping her to determine and align her values in the workplace to ultimately cultivate sustainable career satisfaction. Regular listeners will be familiar with many of the themes we discuss and Andrea gives truly valuable perspective.
Andrea first introduced me to Ted Lasso and the #Medlasso movement inspired by Dr Mark Shapiro from the Explore the Space Podcast and no discussion of leadership and team culture would be complete without some #medlasso critique!
Contact /Links/References:
Dr Andrea Austin
https://www.andreaaustinmd.com
https://twitter.com/EMSimGal
Revitalize Women Physician Circle
https://www.peoplealwayshcc.com/revitalize
Podcasts
https://www.emergencymind.com/podcast
https://feminem.org/women-in-medicine/
https://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644(17)30059-8/fulltext
https://www.susandavid.com/about-emotional-agility
https://www.explorethespaceshow.com
Disclaimer: The content in this podcast is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advi

The Mind Full Medic Podcast is proudly sponsored by the MBA NSW-ACT Find out more about their service or donate today at www.mbansw.org.au
Disclaimer: The content in this podcast is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care professional. Moreover views expressed here are our own and do not necessarily reflect those of our employers or other official organisations.

Previous Episode

Communication in crisis, the value of deep work, dealing with trauma and other lessons from the newsroom with Melissa Clarke.

In S2 E13 I am delighted to welcome Melissa Clarke to the podcast. Melissa is a political reporter with the ABC, working at Parliament House in Canberra. It’s a job she has had, with a few interludes, for more than a decade. She reports on politics, parliament and national affairs across a range of radio and television programs, as well as ABC digital news site. Melissa’s reporting experience spans beyond politics though, having been a foreign correspondent based at the ABC London bureau, reporting from Pacific nations, and reporting in-depth on issues including the environment, national security and justice - and the occasional bushfire. Away from the work, Melissa is a dedicated runner who has experienced a brief period of success at the high performance level, but has had a lifelong passion for running, endurance challenges and the great outdoors.
In this conversation we discuss and explore Melissa's work as a reporter and I draw some parallels with my own profession and day-to-day work in the emergency department, particularly with respect to the need to respond to ever-changing circumstances and crises.
As both doctor and amateur podcaster, I was keen to glean some tips from an expert on interview skills and communicating under pressure.
Indeed through this conversation I found some additional parallels but also broadened the lens and perspective through which I viewed her role and indeed modern media more generally.
Melissa is an avid reader and we explore how she navigates the need to read widely and consume all forms of media as part of her work with both a professional and personal yearning to cultivate deeper work and reading.
Naturally as fellow runner and lover of endurance pursuits and the outdoors, we discuss her why of adventure racing and how she cultivates time and space for self-care outside a job which could be 24/7, if she let it.

Links/ references:
Melissa Clarke
Twitter @Clarke_Melissa

Dart Center for Journalism an Trauma
https://dartcenter.org

Melissa's recommenced reads:
We Were Not Men Campbell Mattinson
https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460713150/we-were-not-men/

Power without Glory Frank Hary
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/power-without-glory-9781741667615
Why Die? The extraordinary Percy Cerutty maker of champions
https://www.percy-cerutty.com

Sky Runner Emelie Forsberg
https://www.emelieforsberg.com

The Secret Race Tyler Hamilton
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-secret-race-9780552169172

What I talk about when I talk about running Haruki Murakami https://www.harukimurakami.com/book/what-i-talk-about-when-i-talk-about-running-a-memoir

Endure Alex Hutchison

Next Episode

Studying team culture and cultivating psychological safety in medicine with Dr Eve Purdy

In S2 E15 I am delighted to welcome Dr Eve Purdy to the podcast. Dr Purdy has a fascinating skill set as both Emergency Physician and Applied Anthropologist. She completed her emergency medicine residency in Kingston, Ontario in Canada whilst concurrently studying for her masters in anthropology in Utah. Today she combines her passion and expertise using her skills to research and evaluate culture and team dynamics in emergency medicine and resuscitation.
In the first half of this episode Eve introduces her research work and methods to explore the values, beliefs and practises defining culture in emergency medicine. I was first introduced to this through the video she produced "Welcome to the ED family". This resonated widely in our emergency medicine community and was inspired by research work using a simulated emergency department to produce an environment of "cultural compression" to study our core values, beliefs and defining practises in emergency medicine. I particularly like Eve's take that Emergency Medicine is well characterised as "navigating uncertainty together." We go on to discuss a second study, the subject of Eve's thesis, looking at trauma team dynamics using simulation and she summarises key findings and characteristics of high performing teams.
In the second part of the conversation Eve tells me more about her work on cultivating psychologically safe teams in medicine. She explores the what, why and how of psychological safety in clinical settings. Eve highlights the importance of small moments and opportunities throughout our working day to optimise safety for staff ( the means) and ultimately positively impact quality of care for our patients ( the goal). Such moments include the team huddle, after-action review and onus on senior clinicians to set the tone. I left our conversation with some very practical and actionable strategies and pearls to take to the clinical floor tomorrow.
I learned a lot from Eve and look forward to following future applied research from Dr Purdy and her team. Enjoy!
More about Dr Purdy:
https://www.evepurdy.infohttps://twitter.com/purdy_eve

Research links and other references:
Welcome to the ED Family
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rasElDEGxKA
Identifying and Transmitting the Culture of Emergency Medicine Through Simulation
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/aet2.10325Doing our work better, together: a relationship-based approach to defining the quality improvement agenda in trauma care.
https://bmjopenquality.bmj.com/content/bmjqir/9/1/e000749.full.pdfBook recommendations/further reading:
http://danielcoyle.com/the-culture-code/
https://www.triballeadership.net
https://www.amazon.com.au/High-Performance-Healthcare-Relationships-Efficiency-ebook/dp/B002CBF1YK
https://fearlessorganization.com
Rate, review, subscribe:
https://www.themindfullmedicpodcast.com
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-mind-full-medic-podcast