The status quo has changed.

Surely, we’ve all heard that from one healthcare organization in some form. “Here at Jimmy’s House of Medicine our brand of medicine is different” and we’ve all heard the classic trope of “We’re not co-workers, we’re family.” I can say for the duration of my career I’ve heard my various employers parrot the same empty rhetoric about how the way they do things is “moving medicine forward” or extending another platitude that their system or service is superior to the other by using some tired wordplay like “Moving at the speed of life.” We use these recruiting tools to bring people into our hospital systems, and then we expose them to the same exhausting, short-staffed, long-hours, toxic work environments that we’ve all gotten used to. Then a new generation of employees come in, and the cycle perpetuates. We often talk about the need for things to change, but then we never act on it. I submit that this lack of change is often to do a systemic lack of will. That is, organizations writ large are fearful of change so they elect to do nothing and offer non-answers as solutions. Of course, this is done while saying the organization will always do whatever it can to stay current.