What was Steve’s secret sauce? Helping young oarsmen find their sense of purpose and passion for rowing and bring their full measure of effort each and every day they are on the water (Gladstone 2024). Where are the Jacksons, Popovichs, and Gladstones of Healthcare? Likely they are there, under-recognized and overstretched trying to instill deep trust and teamwork into their workplace teams, developing small islands of teaming that must engage with otherwise siloed and splintering contexts.
Coaching in healthcare
Much as is the case in most sectors of American society, coaching initially focused on health care executives, who were provided with 1:1 coaching. This coaching was likely to be provided with substantial success as these senior executives adapt to rising levels of rugged and ever-changing healthcare landscapes (Miller and Page, 2007). However, middle management and frontline team level coaching has received little attention, resources, or effort to date.
There are some signs of a rising tide around clinicians educating each other using coaching principles as we see in Branzetti et al (2023). Branzetti points out that despite the robust supportive evidence for coaching in business literature, it remains rare in the context of healthcare. Yet, in medicine, they indicate evidence has emerged that in an academic medicine context, coaching has demonstrated:
- Improving faculty well-being, quality of life and resilience
- Help faculty attain professional goals
- Increase faculty academic productivity
- Improve overall clinical learning environment of the institution
These four (4) areas of improvement are vitally important to today’s healthcare environment in which the majority of physicians are now struggling with burn-out and face rising expectations for clinical productivity, with greater challenges sustaining positive emotional energy, a connection with each other and the deeper meaning of their work.
The Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education (the ACGME which regulates all Physician Residency training in the United States) has been so concerned about erosion of the Clinical Learning Environment that they created a completely new Institutional oversight around 2015 in order to specifically focus attention on improving the institutional learning environments for Resident Physicians across the USA. Healthcare is experiencing the greatest challenge to work and learning environments since the Flexner Report upheavals in the 1910 – 1920’s period.
Yet, a quick search for “Coaching” and “Healthcare” turns up a scant though rising array of articles to help leaders and clinicians in healthcare to increase the role of coaching. One of the few articles was written by one of us in association with Michael Cassatly (Cassatly and Bergquist, 2011).
Using a 1:1 Coaching Model also does not appear to be the right framework for healthcare given the vast number of healthcare workers and the enormous variety of healthcare workers—although physicians in executive positions now often have some level of access to such coaching, whether in-person or virtually based on their leadership role in the healthcare system.
