Jay Shah, MD, chief of the medical staff for Stanford Health Care, recently stood on a stage in front of more than 150 people, recalling a time he broke down in a hospital stairwell after losing a patient as an attending surgeon.
Dr. Shah shared his story as part of a storytelling event for physicians, residents and medical students at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Medicine.
Stanford developed the Story Rounds program shortly before the pandemic to create a safe, private space for physicians to express their emotions and connect with peers about hardships they face on the job. The storytelling events are only open to physicians, and recordings of their stories are not publicly shared.
The Stanford Medicine WellMD & WellPhD Center and Medical Humanities & the Arts Program co-sponsor the program.
Dr. Shah, who oversees more than 3,200 physicians at Stanford, said it's important for physician leaders to show their own vulnerabilities, as it gives others permission to open up, too
"We do hard things by the very nature of our profession. Yet we don't talk about the impact of those things on us. It's not bred into us. We don't see that behavior modeled. Because we don't see others doing it, we also may never feel comfortable doing it," Dr. Shah said in a June 27 news release.
"I want people to say, 'If the chief of staff can go up there and talk about these things, then maybe I'm not so unusual, maybe I'm not so bad. I guess I can feel OK owning my imperfections too,'" he added.