Full-time clinical Faculty Spotlight: Lindee Strizich
Written by Lindee Strizich, MD, MSc
Work
As the Graduate Medical Education (GME) director of Quality and Patient Safety at UW-Montlake, a huge part of my work is focused on fostering trainee engagement with UW Medicine’s culture of safety and continuous quality improvement.
Major elements of this work include elevating the voices and perspectives of trainees in quality improvement and patient safety work at UW-Montlake and to serve as a bridge between the learning environment and our hospital’s administration.
I also have the pleasure of serving as the 6NE Unit Medical Director and in addition to supporting the excellent work of our nursing colleagues on this unit I get to partner with them on quality improvement initiatives.
This year UW-Medicine is focusing on transitions of care as an institution wide patient safety initiative, so we are identifying ways to improve handoffs on our unit. This year I am also excited to serve as a mentor for a group of our hospitalists completing the Quality and Patient Safety Certificate Program to standardize timeouts for bedside procedures on acute care floors.
In addition, I spend a great deal of my time serving on various QI and patient safety oversight committees and have served on our sepsis committee since its inception.
When I was resident, physician driven QI and PS work was still a relatively niche area that I didn’t have a great deal of exposure to. It wasn’t until my first year as an attending at UW-Montlake performing a root cause analysis into a medication error that occurred with one of my patients that I fully understood the importance of this work.
As I investigated the factors leading to this error, I realized that the system was set up to fail and this was a mistake that could have happened no matter which physician was on service.
This experience sparked my passion to improve our care systems to support us in providing the best care possible. If the system we work within does not make it easy to provide great care, then it doesn’t matter how amazing a doctor is, mistakes will happen.
I am excited that the ACGME and hospital systems recognize that understanding the basics of quality and patient safety work is fundamental to being a great physician.
Working at UW
When I first joined the division of General Internal Medicine at UW- Montlake as a hospitalist my career path was very undifferentiated. However, I found so much support within the division to explore different areas and people were always willing to discuss their work and assist with getting involved in ongoing projects. It was actually hard at first (and still is sometimes!) to say no to all the exciting projects that were sent my way.
Both formal and ad hoc mentors have been integral to helping me define what I’m passionate about and what opportunities make sense for what I want my career to be. You do have to put yourself out there and be open to trying new things, but there are a ton of opportunities to get involved in what you find interesting. You can make a career path that may be unexpected but is better than what you imagined!
I think the most amazing thing about working at UW is the people! We have a fantastic group of hospitalists and medicine consult physicians who, besides being world-class physicians, are just really good and extremely interesting people who are a fantastic bunch to spend your day with. Our nursing staff, pharmacists, and administrative staff are also amazing! It really is the people that make this job feel less like work and more like fun and a place I really enjoy being.