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Anyone who has been through medical school will tell you that you have to pass a lot of tests before you are able to call yourself a doctor. But to call yourself a Top Doctor you have to pass one of the toughest tests of all – the judgment of your peers. That’s why it’s so gratifying to see so many doctors from CPMC – and the Sutter Pacific Medical Foundation and Novato Community Hospital – on the list of [415] Top Doctors 2012 for San Francisco and Marin Counties.
The list was compiled by Marin Magazine which polled more than 4,000 doctors in San Francisco and Marin, asking them to vote for the physician or physicians they considered to be the best in their field. The doctors could vote for any physician – except themselves – and could cast as many votes as they liked across all specialties, but could only vote for each doctor once.
Top of the list
When they tallied the results some 600 doctors with the highest vote counts were included on the [415] Top Doctors 2012, and of those 243 were Sutter Health physicians with most of them being part of CPMC or our Sutter Pacific Medical Foundation.
The reason why this kind of list is important is that it reflects how highly a doctor’s colleagues, and in many ways their competitors, regard them. That is a wonderful thing to be able to say, not just for the physician but also for the hospital where they practice.
It’s pretty cool for patients too because it means they are being cared for by some of the best physicians around. And let’s face it, when you are sick, you want nothing but the best possible care.
Vital information
The list isn’t perfect of course. You won’t find any of our great Emergency Department physicians named to this list, mostly because most people don’t end up in the ED often enough – fortunately – to know which doctors there are the best. But it does at least represent a very broad group of physicians in a wide range of specialties, and it gives consumers some useful information to help guide them when they are looking for a physician.
When it comes to your health, the more information you have to help guide you in your decision making the better.
You can do a lot of things in five minutes: answer a couple of emails, return a phone call, make a cup of tea, or boil an egg. You can read the Gettysburg address, aloud, twice, and still have time to spare (it took Lincoln just over two minutes, at a time when most politicians spoke for an hour or more). At CPMC we have decided to take five minutes of your time to share news about things that are important to all of us.
News huddles
We are going to start holding five-minute huddles, once a week, for everyone who works here. The huddles will take place on nursing units, in administrative offices, kitchens, and cafeterias at all our campuses. The program is designed to help all of us understand what’s happening at the medical center by sharing information about changes in policies, new programs, or just news that is relevant to how we do our jobs. Each department will add some personal touches so the information is particularly relevant to their team, such as “wins” that your department has enjoyed, or maybe a letter from a grateful patient thanking you for the work you did.
At this point you are probably asking “Don’t we already have lots of ways of reaching out to employees and letting them know what’s going on?” Yes we do, but they don’t reach everyone (not everyone has ready access to a computer for emails) and they don’t offer the chance to ask questions or make comments.
Good communications
That’s why we’re taking this new approach. By having managers and supervisors talk directly with their teams in small groups, we can ensure that everyone, regardless of where they work or what shift they are on, gets to hear the same message. By limiting the time to five minutes, we are being respectful of your time, and not take you away from the important work that you do.
