Working as a pediatrician in NY during Covid sucks. Let me just get that out of the way. It was and has continued to be an exercise in futility, frustration, and fear. (There’s a whole other blog/video coming about that). But, luckily, the work I do as a leadership coach has saved my sanity and helped me survive what has got to be the darkest times I’ve experienced as a physician.

As NY crawled through the worst phase of the pandemic, I was asked by Vital Worklife to comment on leadership strategies for other organizations who had not yet faced the trauma and disaster that we had in NY. I gave them my honest answers, sometimes with the added drama of my own moral injury and emotion seeping through.

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to vent to people who cared and to hopefully prevent other places being hit as hard as we were. My big takeaways for leadership:

-Show Up. Not via an email, but in person, on the floors, with lunch in hand if possible. Let us know that we are not battling this disease alone while our leaders hide out at home. Be with us, we need the support.

-Be Transparent. Even it’s ugly and won’t necessarily raise our spirits. Just having open communication with leadership, showing us your frustrations and limitations, goes a long way to putting us on the same team.

-Provide easy access for mental health resources. I fully appreciate that every place I work at as a doc began providing mental health resources during this time. Some, though, required you to click a bunch of links or register online to be able to access the content. Others were videos that were 30 minutes long. None of us on the frontlines have time for that. Make the resources short, sweet, easy to use.

Here is the link to the full article. If you’re a leader in a health care organization or a frontline provider, I hope this helps express our concerns and helps carve a path forward. Be safe all.

How to Lead your Organization Through Covid-19