Julie Sprengel, division president at Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health joined the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast” to discuss resilience in healthcare.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full podcast episode here.
Question: How do you keep yourself so motivated, positive and mission-focused? Do you have any thoughts on how you go about doing that?
Julie Sprengel: You know, I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately with my healthcare leader colleagues about healthcare resilience and how resilience has both been our
blessing and our curse as healthcare leaders and healthcare organizations. We are always gonna be resilient. If people need us to take care of them in a pandemic, we’re gonna show up. If there’s violence in our communities, we’re gonna show up to take care of those patients. We’re always gonna be there. That’s what keeps us grounded and focused, because people need us. At the same time, that resilience can work against us too, right? There’s that overconfidence that our healthcare system will still be there when they need us. It’s trying to balance those stressors, because believe me, we all have them. I definitely don’t wanna be somebody that minimizes the stress that we’re in and we have by no means made it out the other side.
This is probably the most challenging time for us in healthcare. Even when our hospitals were full of COVID patients, it’s more difficult for us now because all of the challenges have come to fruition and trying to return to day to day operations. I try to remember why we all went into this in the first place. Resilience is coupled with perseverance, and we want to be there for our patients in the community and our over-exhausted, mentally drained workforce looks to us as leaders to give them a reason to remind them why it still matters and that we hear them, that our patients still need us no matter what the other noise is and how hard it is. We have people that are most vulnerable, and that’s why we do this. That’s why we have to stay positive and try to take the lessons learned to continue to go on because we’re, our patients are never gonna go away. If anything, they need us now more than ever.
