A Call to All Healthcare Leaders

In Healthcare we have many seeking to lead, but few leaders.

We have the rehashed, the status quo, but few willing to break barriers, to set the mold.

Consequently, Healthcare follows familiar patterns, set trends in which empty rhetoric passes as visionary policy.

Healthcare needs leaders, men and women who lead through experience, not advise through expertise. Who fall in the arena of life – professionally and personally – and rise to share their experiences – turning experience into expertise.

Healthcare has always been experiential. The fabled physicians of lore, Hippocrates, Galen, and Maimonides were all experientialists, who saw the patient experience as the foundation of patient care.

The progenitor of modern Medicine, Sir William Osler said, “the good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease”, and revolutionized Healthcare by advocating bed-side patient evaluations.

A sentiment echoed by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience”, advocating interpretations of the law relative to how the law is experienced, by those most affected.

Yet even in the modern rendition of Healthcare, inextricably wrapped in a litigious veneer, we fail to recognize the importance of experience.

Instead we attempt to substitute expertise, knowledge and logic gleaned in isolation, for real Healthcare experience. We have those leading Healthcare wrapped in corporate suits, hidden in ivory tower board rooms – far from the patient bedside.

Healthcare cannot exist in sterile isolation. It is meant to be lived, in all its messy glory.

Healthcare leaders must embrace the realities of Healthcare, experience it as it is meant to be experienced – through the experience of patients.

Embrace the successes, the failures – but above all, embrace the attempts, the continual progress towards improvement, and the eternal spring of hope.

See the broken smile of the patient who has lost it all, but gained immeasurable courage.

Hear the cries of the bedridden child too weak to move, but too courageous to give up the fight.

Know what Healthcare means to these patients, to your patients, to all the patients who live their experiences daily.

This is what Healthcare leaders must experience – the daily experience, the eternal battle patients endure.

This is Healthcare as it is meant be experienced. And the experience through which it should be led.

Cheers to the Healthcare leaders.