A neurosurgeon’s view of compassion in action

by Liz Boehm
Executive Strategist, Human-Centered Research

Imagine yourself as an early-career neurosurgeon. Imagine you’ve dedicated yourself to more than a decade of training, foregoing much of the life-flexibility and compensation that your non-medical peers enjoy. You’ve honed skills and led hundreds, if not thousands of high-stakes surgeries. You are good at what you do. You take pride in taking great care of your patients. 

And then two of your family members fall ill. You support them through their care experiences, and you discover there’s a whole side of healing you didn’t learn about in training. You have tons of care and compassion for your patients, but no one taught you the difference between having those innate feelings and expressing them effectively to your patients. No one taught you that communication and connection are critical to patient healing and care team member wellbeing. 

That’s where Dr. Jody Stern found himself after two of his family members passed away after long illnesses. And it’s why he’s dedicating his post-surgical career to teaching compassion in action – the skills and abilities that will help his fellow neurosurgeons ensure their patients get the best care. Dr. Stern’s work falls into three focus areas: 

Communication skill building. Medical schools and training programs are increasingly teaching students the skills of communicating and connecting with patients, but these programs often overlook surgeons in general and neurosurgeons particularly. Dr. Stern is working to extend skill building to surgeons so they can communicate more effectively with patients and with fellow care team members. 

Palliative care integration. Surgery can be very oriented on “fixing” – excising the tumor, repairing the aneurysm, grafting over the cerebrospinal fluid leak. But cures and fixes aren’t always possible – and even when they are patients can benefit from the whole-person focus of palliative care specialists. Dr. Stern is working to integrate palliative care into neurosurgical treatment pathways so patients get more complete care. 

Surgical ergonomics. Surgeons spend long hours standing over patients, heads bent down and physically navigating the intricate structures of patients’ anatomy. Performing surgery can be hard on surgical team members’ bodies, resulting in fatigue or repetitive stress injuries. Having cut his own surgical career short due to injuries, Dr. Stern is studying and evangelizing approaches that improve the ergonomics of surgery so that surgical team members can safely practice for their full careers. 

Dr. Stern’s work recognizes that the dedicated professionals who perform surgery benefit from skills beyond those needed for the act of surgery itself. By focusing on skill building and systems change, Dr. Stern is helping to advance surgical team member safety and wellbeing. You can hear from him directly in this Caring Greatly podcast episode.

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