Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School; Executive Network Director,
Division of Emergency Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital; Medical Director of Pediatrics,
Beverly Hospital; Attending Physician, Pediatric Emergency Medicine, Boston Children’s
Hospital and Beverly Hospital
Boston, Massachusetts
“I oversee 50 full-time physicians, and a big part of my responsibility is hiring.
In the last academic year I hired 17 physicians, mostly women. ... I find that women
never ask for more money. I sometimes say in an interview, ‘And this is the time when
you ask for a sign-on bonus.’ ... A lot of pediatric emergency medicine fellows and
pediatricians are women, and the thing they worry about most is having a life outside
of medicine—about the pressure of allocating time appropriately between demands. They
wonder if there’s time to get married and have children. Of course there is. Women
tend to have longer careers than men because they are often healthier and tend to
live longer, so they have time later in their career to consider a leadership role.
So I tell them it’s OK to take care of your family early on. And I tell them that
deciding to be a leader in medicine means pursuing your goals to improve care—doing
what you want to do. ... There are no cowboys in pediatric emergency medicine. It’s
very family-centered care. A lot of the evidence about certain things we do is based
on adults, so we proceed cautiously. ... Reimbursements are down, but the numbers
of patients are up, and so is the complexity of our cases. We’re worried about the
intersection of these things. ... We like to partner with general pediatricians so
they can treat patients in their offices when possible. But some people don’t have
primary care physicians, or can’t afford not to go to work, or lack transportation,
and then they end up in the emergency room. ... I’ve had as many male mentors as female.
Good mentors give you a chance. In medicine, you spend so much time training to be
a good clinician, but not a good leader. Mentors have to be able to let you make your
own mistakes.”
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