Service weeks can feel difficult. We know patient care is the priority, but the in-hospital and out-of-hospital world doesn’t stop. This guide assumes your service week starts on Monday, but you can modify it however you need to for your service schedule. With that, here’s how to have your best service week yet!

July 1st can feel like New Year’s Day in academic medicine. As new learners take the place of the seasoned ones, it’s a natural time for us to take stock of what we’ve accomplished over the past year and think about what we’d like to do differently in the upcoming year. Yearly evaluations with division directors can serve as a jumping-off point toward achieving those goals.

Stay with me. I’m writing this as a human who witnesses suffering first, then a pediatric intensivist, and then a clinical ethicist. So, like this:

Human > Pediatric Intensivist > Clinical Ethicist

I’m writing this with the utmost respect for all the physicians, nurses, and ethicists who have researched this topic and are trying so hard to help us out of this burnout hole we find ourselves in.

My husband and I are re-binging the first two seasons in preparation for the new season of Ted Lasso being released. For the uninitiated, Roy Kent (played by Brett Goldstein) is an angry, foul-mouthed curmudgeon of a soccer player (ah, apologies, footballer) who (spoiler alert) turns out to have a massively huge heart.

How many times has this thought crossed your mind? I can start the day with the best of intentions and then get to the end of the day feeling that I haven’t accomplished a single thing (even when “the end of the day” comes an hour and a half after I’d intended the day to end).