Letter from the Chief Medical Officer
Dear Colleagues:
Physicians play a leading role in building and maintaining an environment at Brigham and Women’s Hospital that enables all our clinicians to deliver excellent care to our patients and their families with compassion and kindness. It’s the central mission of our new Center for Professionalism and Peer Support to sustain and enhance this environment and culture in which we support our colleagues every day and even more so in difficult times.
Under the leadership of Dr. Jo Shapiro, our chief of Otolaryngology, this new center will take our Peer Support Program to a new level throughout the hospital. If a BWH clinician is touched by an adverse event, he or she will feel supported personally through Peer Support. The center’s Disclosure and Apology program will provide clinicians with coaching and support in how to address adverse events with patients and families.
Dr. Shapiro also will oversee our professionalism program, leading efforts to build consensus on a clear set of expectations, establish consistency in responding to complaints of inappropriate behavior and identify ways to ensure professionalism dominates our culture.
The fourth arm of the center is a new program to support physicians when an adverse event results in a law suit. Several senior physicians at BWH, who have been sued, including me, are committed to reaching out to new defendants so they have someone to talk with. Thankfully, very few BWH physicians face such an ordeal.
Brigham and Women’s has a rich cultural diversity drawn from across the globe. We boast a true mixture of students, physicians and researchers just starting out and an active senior staff with decades of valuable experience. Our departments, divisions and units have distinct personalities stemming from nearly 14,000 employees. Caring about one another enables us to achieve our mission of excellence in research, education and patient care.
Sincerely,
Andy Whittemore, MD
Chief Medical Officer