Dr. Wendy Dean is a hot-shot doctor, deep thinker, and big-time innovator in health care.   She started out as an emergency room doctor, moved to at least to other super impressive positions, and now leads the Moral Injury of Healthcare non-profit https://fixmoralinjury.org.   She also runs the podcast Moral Matters.

In this live interview we talk about Moral Injury and why the rest of us non-health care types should care.  (The answer is because in order to get better care, we’re going to have to help our physicians focus on care — and not on record keeping, profits, reimbursement and all of the myriad of things they have to do in lieu of being awesome providers.   Our doctors, Wendy tells us, are overwhelmed and exhausted.  What they really want to do is to be full-time physicians;  what they end up doing is a collection of distractions at the very least.

Good news:  Dr. Wendy Dean is on the case.  She is working with health care systems (and anybody else who sees what a massive problem this is) to nurture their physicians, to make them feel heard and listened to with the end goal of improving patient care nationwide.   She has big goals.  But from my seat here in my studio, she is the right person in the right job.

At the end of the interview, I ask Wendy what gives her hope.  Here answer made me happy.  She said the people on the front lines of health care give her hope…they keep doing the right thing for their patients no matter what.  And administrators more and more are giving her hope because they too work hard to get the right care to the right people in the right ways.  Nice.

Thanks Dr. Dean.  It was a pleasure.

And yup…. I heard you.  “Wear a mask!”   Ok.  I’m in.