While I’ve yet to resume a regular blogging pace this calendar year, rest assured the blog is not dead. Plenty of ideas are percolating, and I grow ever close to actualizing them.

Some (perhaps many) of you reading this today discovered this website because you read The White Coat Investor.

The White Coat Investor, run by Jim Dahle, is the most well-known website/resource on the planet to teach financial to physicians (as well as other high-income professionals). He’s created a mini-empire of blogs, podcasts, videos, online courses, and books. Rare is the young physician in the United States who is not familiar with him (many of the older ones know of as well).

He is hosting his second ever Physician Wellness and Financial Literacy Conference (aka WCICON20). He released his agenda today, and if you didn’t discover me through that channel, I’m happy to share I’ll be one of the keynote speakers. I’ll be giving an hour-long talk as well as participating in a panel discussion.

Click here to see the full agenda. There are not many spots and it will fill up fast, so if you want to register, do it ASAP. Registration opens at 7pm Mountain Time on July 8th!

Second Victim Syndrome

My main talk will be about Second Victim Syndrome — a known but under-recognized issue in healthcare. Second victims are “healthcare providers who are involved in an unanticipated adverse patient event, medical error and/or a patient related injury and become victimized in the sense that the provider is traumatized by the event.”

The definition is broad and the discussion only coming to the forefront recently, but the concept is old and the implications clear. Many of us in healthcare have had significant negative mental health impacts when patients of ours have negative outcomes, even if there was no medical error leading to the poor outcome.

I’ll be discussing not only the research and organizational imperatives around this topic, but also personal experiences. It’s not something I’ve discussed widely before, but next year I’ll be sharing a lot of detail with ~600 of my new closest friends at the conference.

The talk is titled “Recovering from Cases that Make You Cry” — hopefully no tears are shed during the talk itself! In reality, none of my co-workers peg me as the one that cries — it’s far more common to comment on me having a calm approach to all things (or stern/dad-like demeanor with some occasional crankiness when I’m tired). Few would peg me as the speaker to talk about crying, which is all the more reason for me to do it.

And if some of my friends send me some Crying Jordan memes, I’ll just give them a stern and disapproving look.

Financial Education for Trainees

I’ll also be part of a panel of speakers discussing how to provide financial education to medical trainees. For the last several years I’ve provided lectures on personal finance to a combined group of our pediatrics and internal medicine residents at our university, and have spoken to multiple other residencies as well as our graduating medical students. I’ve even published a research study on this topic (this links to a blog post about the article from a couple years ago; here is the link to free full access to article itself) , and I continue to collaborate on research in this area.

The personal finance talks I deliver are some of the most enjoyable ones I give every year, and I think (hope) the residents enjoy them as well. They are part of a multi-part educational series I started in conjunction with colleagues from our internal medicine department. For the last few years we’ve given this 4-5 part lecture series to the combined pediatric/internal medicine residencies at our institution (that’s nearly 300 trainees, though given work obligations not all attend each lecture). I’ve also delivered talks to trainees in surgery, urology, and our graduating medical students (and will be talking to some neurologists soon as well).

I’m particularly excited this year for a session where we will host a panel of physicians from different practice structures discussing how they chose their path, giving trainees a glimpse of how one ends up in life outside of academic medicine. In addition, we’re flying in a guest speaker to give a talk on asset protection. I think it’s phenomenal we have a chance to provide this education — it’s not “medical” but it’s important and relevant — and I wish this had been available during my training. It’s great to be able to provide this and to be at an institution that supports it.

Even without this type of education, physicians in training now are far ahead of where most were when I was in training. The White Coat Investor has a lot to do with it by imparting wisdom, but also indirectly and directly inspiring efforts such as mine to build this information directly into curriculums. I’m far from the only one doing this — there are others doing this that are accomplishing things far more impressive. I’m looking forward to meeting some of you and learning from the other panelists!

Vegas Baby, Vegas!

Giving talks to large groups brings on a slight bit of nerves, but the good kind that you get before a big performance. Most everyone who knows me in-real-life knows I love to talk (usually my main issue is not knowing when to shut up).

I anticipate a little bit of nerves for WCICON 2020 — in Las Vegas in March 2020 — but I am excited to meet everyone. I’ve read Jim’s work since his blog launched many years ago, have learned a great deal from his writing, and think this will be a great chance to teach and to learn from others.

I’m looking forward to meeting some of you in person next year, and perhaps at other speaking engagements should the opportunity arise.