The AAFP Marathon Parking Lot
A lot of people sent me this AAFP piece called “Clinical Practice Culture: Moving From Surviving to Thriving” for me to poke fun at. I thought it was a parody already and had to read it twice to make sure. I mean, c’mon, the AAFP couldn’t have made it this easy, right? Look at this stuff:
They actually simplified our whole lives and put it into a graph! I guess we are that simple to manipulate? But wait, there’s more:
- “You’ll never provide five out of five care if you’re functioning as a one or two out of five,” Greenawald notes. “The math doesn’t add up.”
In my Placebo Journal days I would have made stickers that doctors could wear which would show how well we were functioning that day. Everybody in the ad would have a 1.
- Greenawald has coined an approach to shaping an optimal practice culture that identifies six components for consideration, using the acronym STARRS
- Service
- Teamwork
- Attitude
- Reflection
- Renewal
- Self-care
I was thinking more like:
- Sadness
- Tiredness
- Alcohol
- Recruiter (as in find one)
- Retribution
- Self-pity
Wait, for a limited time, and if you order now, you can get this:
- Conduct “State of the YOUnion” assessments. Developed by Greenawald and it’s basically his STARRS thing again.
- Have clinical huddles. A way for the care team to check in with each other personally.
- Get a PeerRX. Regularly check in with one another to offer support, advice, and a listening ear.
I am going to let you, my reader, have fun with his YOUnion and PeerRx stuff. I don’t know Greenawald but at a quick glance he is a career educator who rarely, if ever, worked much in the real world.
When I first read this all I could think of was Planes, Trains and Automobiles with Steve Martin and John Candy. One of my favorite scenes is when Martin’s character (Neal Page) was trying to get a rental car. Watch it above. We are Steve Martin and the AAFP is the rental car agency. The lady behind the counter is Greenawald. When he offers to help us we want to say:
“You can start by wiping that f&cking dumbass ass smile off your rosy f&cking cheeks.”
Then we would complain about how the AAFP left us out there without a means of surviving and then the conversation would go something like:
Us: Then you can get me a real job. Without f&cking metrics, without f&cking administrators, without f&cking prior authorizations, without f&cking insurance companies, and without dealing with the f&cking government!
Well, no wonder I never had a chance. I didn’t have an accountability partner to tell me
where the hell I was on the wellness spectrum.
Wow, I don’t feel so guilty now with all the colorful language I used here in the past that Doug
had to cen”sore”. 🙂 I love it!
Can always use a chuckle in these humorless hard times in healthcare today.
Would be great if you could overdub your script into the Steve Martin scene, and add an AAFP nametag to the woman behind the counter.
Anything to do with an acronym these days in my mind needs to be trashed.
What you need to remember when considering the relevance of an AAFP acronym is “FLaMiNG FECES.” No, that’s not an acronym. It’s an observation.