preview

Essay Medical Groups and Their Need of Positive Psychology

Decent Essays

Background
Our health care system has never been more complicated than it is today. Many factors have created this complexity:
• Ongoing scientific research
• Corresponding innovations of new technologies, devices, and pharmaceuticals
• Convoluted changes in an already intricate legal and regulatory environment.
As a result, clinical treatment protocols have been changing at a dizzyingly accelerated pace.
These shifting dynamics have exacerbated the incessant challenges of medical group practice. Keeping up with new rules, regulations, and technologies has demanded increasing time commitments, creating new pressures over subjects like work distribution and on-call coverage. Moreover, decision-making about fundamental business choices have …show more content…

Perhaps one of the most significant challenges we face today is trying to manage the “flight or fight” response to real and perceived danger. Eons ago our ancestors protected themselves from daily existential dangers via the mechanism. Today however, the “flight or fight” response creates a bewildering cycle of overreactions since our brains continue to respond in this intense mode to mere petty (and perhaps unintended) insults or misunderstandings. Inside a medical group practice, staff members might experience countless and various types of “fear,” such as a fear that they are undercompensated - or that someone else is overcompensated, that they don’t have sufficient control -or that they are losing control, that they are working too hard - or that someone else is not working hard enough nor contributing his or her "fair share."
Our inherited propensity for systematic errors in how we process information can prove disastrous in a medical group practice. Decisions driven by fear, irrationality, promises forgotten, inattention to information and simple incompetence for the tasks at hand can diminish trust, as physician colleagues come to view each other as unreliable, insincere, and incompetent.
These negative emotions can

Get Access