Begin Your Journey: Dr. Suskind on her interest in mindfulness

In this installment of “Begin Your Journey,” Scott A. MacDiarmid, MD, FRCPSC, introduces his latest guest, Anne M. Suskind, MD, MS, FACS, FPMRS. MacDiarmid is a urologist with Alliance Urology Specialists in Greensboro, North Carolina. Suskind is an associate professor of urology; obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive services, associate chair of faculty affairs and diversity, equity, and inclusion, and chief of neurourology and female pelvic medicine and reconstructive surgery at the University of California, San Francisco.

Transcription:

MacDiarmid: Welcome everyone, this is Scott MacDiarmid, and welcome to our series entitled "Begin Your Journey." It's a physician wellness series; we try to make it very interactive. I really want to thank Urology Times for supporting this endeavor. It's nice having people like Urology Times really helping us speak about physician burnout. The goal of this series is to do anything possible to help create a world that lifts up health care providers who serve our nation, so they can be joyful and really love what they do. I love interviewing people and just listening, and it's really bringing on experts that have a similar passion to help create this world. Burnout is a public health crisis. There's not enough doctors and nurses loving their job anymore, and we have to take that quite seriously. And what Anne and I are trying to do today is to give some practical solutions, not just talk about the problem [but] give some solutions that may help some folks. You never know who you may help. I'm really honored to talk to Dr. Anne Suskind. She's the vice chairman of the department of urology at the University of California, San Francisco. She is associate chair of academic affairs and wellness; I want to talk to Anne specifically about that. She's a leaky bladder doctor like myself; we've both done fellowships. Mine was a long time ago; I think Anne's was less than 10 years ago in neurourology and pelvic floor reconstruction. She has a nice appointment in the department of gynecology as well. Anne, I've heard you speak to a mutual friend, so I sort of learned more about you. I'm going to use some of that in developing some of the things I've heard you say before, but tell us about you and your family and Nepal.

Suskind: Thank you so much for inviting me to speak today with you. It's always fun to connect with like-minded people, and to talk about these sorts of topics, which are really just my true inner passion behind everything that I do. Like you, I love helping people to connect with their passions and to find and create the lives that they wish to create, both within the field of medicine and urology, and I mean, it's all the same everywhere, right? And so in all parts of their lives. You mentioned Nepal; that harkens back to my college years when I studied abroad and spent a semester in Nepal and really started to learn about different philosophies and traditions that a lot of people talk about, in terms of mindfulness and spirituality. That's always been something that's been a common thread of interest to me throughout the years, and I've continued to learn and study different traditions, and weave it all together because I think that our lives aren't siloed as urologists or doctors or surgeons or whatever we think of ourselves as. Those are roles that we play and important parts of our lives and certainly pieces of us that take a lot of our time and effort and energy, but first and foremost, we're human beings and we have full lives and many, many facets to what we do and who we are.

This transcription was edited for clarity.