What made me want to do this blog thing anyway?

Last November, I went to a conference on Physician Leadership for Women. One of the sessions was on blogging and social media as a way to create an online brand for physicians. They recommended I buy my name as a domain to start, and then think about what I might have to say / what I’d want my brand to be.

I bought the domain that night, but had no idea what I wanted to say in a blog. I had to sit with that a while. Will people want to read posts from me? I’m a southern girl at heart and tend to be wary of sounding like I’m bragging when talking about myself, so I was hesitant to start a blog. It just doesn’t feel natural to me! Ultimately, I realized I have things I want to put out there into the world and just decided to get started.

But where to begin? I started by making a list of blog post ideas. The first thought was to explain why I wanted to get involved in physician leadership in the first place. Wasn’t I busy enough in my life? Why spend my non patient-care time going to meetings?

My goals for getting involved in physician leadership were and still are:

1. Make life better for practicing OB-GYNs. We have a tough job and I want to do my part to combat the frustration and burnout that can result from life as an OB-GYN. I want to make the EMR less painful. I want to speak out against the encroachment on our time of increasing hospital demands for clicking a gazillion boxes in the EMR and becoming very highly trained data entry technicians who also deliver babies. I also want to speak out against the pseudoscience we deal with every day in our offices and our L&Ds that hurts our patients.
2. Step up and lead some of the changes that are coming our way as physicians. I think we have abdicated the business side of medicine in recent years, and to our detriment. We need to be involved in our organizations and shape the change we want to bring about. Now, I know that’s hard! We have limited time and multiple competing demands. But in medicine, and especially in OB-GYN where more of us are women who generally take on the lions share of the mental work involved in running their homes, we need people to do it anyway.
3. Bring a female perspective to leadership issues in medicine. We women physicians are all just so busy working, seeing patients, taking care of our families, and trying to carve out a little space for ourselves that we are severely under-represented in leadership roles in medicine. We also face different hurdles to achieving those leadership roles. The old boys club is real! Some of us have to work to change that. I’m blessed to have a stay at home husband who keeps the wheels turning at home. This helps me do this leadership work, which really fills my bucket and helps me stay engaged in my clinical work too, because I feel like I’m at least trying to make things better for my fellow doctors.

Thanks for reading this far! I have some other thoughts to come, so stay tuned!