Gene Hobbs received his bachelors in business management with a human resources concentration from North Carolina State University and is a Certified Simulation Healthcare Educator (CHSE). He focused on learning and development of medical faculty and staff and is the former Director of Simulation for the UNC School of Medicine. Gene now serves as the Business Manager for the Department of Neurosurgery at UNC Health Care where he facilitates human resources and business operations with his team. Gene is a Founding Board Member of the Rubicon Foundation, Inc and project manager for their Research Repository that earned him the 2010 DAN/ Rolex Diver of the Year Award.
The statement “First, do no harm”, or “Primum non nocere” is often incorrectly attributed to the Hippocratic Oath but is thought to be derived from "to abstain from doing harm" in the oath.
No time since 1918 has the medical community faced a challenge like the COVID-19 pandemic we currently face. Beyond the thousands of patients, Department Chairs with their HR partners are facing a different application of this phrase.
This year something that had once been an academic exercise became a reality. Myself and a few other managers in our building were asked to come to a conference room and we did not know why. A very senior manager in another department gave us a “heads up” that one of her employees, a medical trainee, was being stalked and threatened. This behavior was also exhibited towards another one of her employees.
Many of us have read through FMLA paperwork describing things we can do to assist our employees with acute or chronic pain. These instructions may ask us to pad the floor by their desks or give extended breaks to allow employees to rest their impacted area(s) of pain.
Autism affects nearly 1 in 68 school aged children in the US (CDC, 2016). With this high prevalence of autism in our population, it is not unlikely that a manager will be faced with an applicant or employee with autism. Just as likely is the possibility that you already have an employee that is the parent of an autistic child.
Christmas tree fires account for an average of 200 house fires every year and 37% of those occur in January. I am reminded this time of year that it is time to check the batteries in my smoke and carbon monoxide (CO) detector. Early in my career I was part of the team that treated patients after they had been exposed to the colorless and odorless carbon monoxide gas.
Not much is scarier than the idea of finding an employee in medical distress. It is important that we do as much as we can to prepare for accommodation when employees present with medical needs but also be aware of potential medical emergencies.
As HR professionals, we often challenged by the way people communicate. Developing soft skills in teams is a critical for your team of experts to function as an expert team. In healthcare, >70 of medical errors have a communication component making the challenge even more critical to our customers.
“Simulation is a technique—not a technology—to replace or amplify real experiences with guided experiences that evoke or replicate substantial aspects of the real world in a fully interactive manner” ~ David Gaba, MD (2004)
