So I’m moving to San Francisco. I’ve been an employed plastic surgeon of Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge for the last 6 years. And as I start cleaning out my office, I think it’s only natural that I start to reminisce. In a good way. Because it’s not always the situation that you’re switching jobs out of happiness. Usually, I would think, people switch jobs because they’re displeased with something – their boss, their coworkers or their general environment. But not me. I’ve been happy, overwhelmingly, with my current and soon to be former employer. Our Lady of the Lake (OLOL) is a Catholic hospital, part of the Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health Systems based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
As I was finishing my plastic surgery fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic a little over 6 years ago, I had the opportunity to take a position as the first employed plastic surgeon at OLOL. They offered a good salary and they would cover the cost of overhead associated with starting a new practice. Since I wasn’t sure where I would want to be for the rest of my professional career, a job that would not require a loan from the bank to get started seemed like a natural choice. I had the option of buying a doctor’s practice in New Orleans or joining a multi-specialty group in Dallas but both of those options would require going into debt and a feeling of being stuck in that location. A job with OLOL would allow me to evaluate my future without feeling like a prisoner to my financial circumstances. But I had no idea that, not only would I not be subservient to a loan from the bank, this would be a way to grow, become comfortable with the very complicated business of taking care of patients and dealing with the stress of healthcare.
I soon came to realize that this is the best job a plastic surgeon can have coming out of fellowship. Not only do you not have to worry about borrowing money to start your own private clinic, but you don’t have to worry about hiring staff, when you know nothing about human resources, you don’t have to worry about purchasing supplies, when you know nothing about the supply chain. A position like this allows you to concentrate on being a doctor and treating patients. By being employed by OLOL, it allowed me to treat patients and learn about human resources and the supply chain and practical aspects of running a clinic at your own pace without a lot of costly mistakes.
Not only that, as the first employed plastic surgeon, OLOL allowed me to cater the practice to what I thought would make it the most successful while covering my contractual responsibilities of covering facial trauma call and running the Baton Rouge plastic surgery fellowship rotation. From that perspective, I was in charge of making sure the plastic surgery fellows from LSU and Tulane that rotated in Baton Rouge had a good experience. Since Hurricane Katrina, there wasn’t a large enough experience for the LSU and Tulane fellows in New Orleans alone and so they rotated in Baton Rouge to round out their experience. That had its ups and downs but in general, from what I heard via evaluations completed by the fellows, they really enjoyed their experience here in Baton Rouge, so much so, that they requested to come back for another rotation during their 3rd year. Their positive experience was due, in part, to OLOL’s support of that rotation.
Our Lady of the Lake has a mission. As a Catholic hospital where the Sisters are still intimately involved in the direction and fulfillment of that mission, they succeed where other hospitals fail. While everyone enjoys pointing out that hospitals only want to make money, in the current healthcare environment, you must make money to have the most nurses available to take care of patients and unfortunately you need money to hire enough administration to meet the demands of all of the past and new forthcoming regulations that are enforced by what seems to be a weekly visit from some accreditation organization. If you think a healthy financial outlook isn’t important, take Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center (King/Drew). This hospital didn’t realize their mission required adequate funding and therefore, they were short staffed, mismanaged and thus had several headline grabbing instances where patients were dying in the emergency room. That hospital was closed. OLOL on the other hand is financially healthy and can therefore carry out their mission of taking care of the community. And while employees do complain from time to time, OLOL has invariably instilled a sense of purpose in their employees. Somehow they are able to get their employees to overlook the cynicism associated with business and healthcare and default to a sense of purpose. Their employees “drink the Kool-Aid”, similar to what I’m expressing now.
Which brings me to the topic of this post. As I was cleaning out my office at the hospital tonight, one of the housekeepers asked if I needed help with disposing of old journal articles I had collected over the years and other papers that did not contain protected health information. This particular housekeeper was a very polite 6 foot 6 inches tall (at least), former basketball player at a junior college. And as I apologized for all of the trash that I needed help removing, I mentioned that I was relocating and that accounted for the office cleaning. He said, “if you don’t mind me asking, where are you moving to?”. I explained that I had an opportunity in San Francisco to go into private practice and even though I was happy in my current position at OLOL, it was a great opportunity for my wife and I, our future children and a company that I had started. He then mentioned that “California is the place of dreams”! I asked if he had been there and he told me that the junior college he played for was in Oxnard, California. He was so pleasant and appeared to take so much pride in his current job and was happy to help. But he’s not the only housekeeper at OLOL that had the same attitude.
Carolyn, who is the housekeeper in and around the operating room at OLOL is no different. She is always pleasant and remembers everyone’s name. I then started to realize that every housekeeper that I had ever come into contact with at Our Lady of the Lake was always pleasant, friendly and seemingly happy to do their job; often happier than doctors making a great deal more money than them. So it got me thinking, is it just a coincidence that every housekeeper I meet is happy?! They certainly don’t seem that happy at a Holiday Inn or a Marriott. All I can figure is that somehow, the housekeepers at this hospital have been instilled with a sense of pride. I find that hard to believe but why else would they be so pleasant systematically?
While not everything was roses during my 6 year tenure, the overarching vibe is one where I choose to sing the praises of my experience here and not feel the need to air my complaints in this public forum. Therefore, I take from this experience that if you can work in an environment that even the housekeepers are happy, then you’re in a good place and you should strive to recreate that environment wherever you go.
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