With coaching, physicians permit themselves to move from a survival and fear-based mindset to one of self-awareness. The coaching process facilitates physicians’ self-awareness as they recreate meaning in their lives and careers that have been shattered by managed care and healthcare reform. They attain the emotional intelligence needed to reexamine and refocus on why they chose a career in healthcare: to connect with and help people. Moreover, as shown in the ICF study, coaching will help physicians improve their communication skill sets—resulting in stronger relationships with their patients and coworkers. Other valuable benefits of stronger physician relationships with patients and coworkers have been persuasively documented. The positive outcomes for society are a decrease in preventable medical injuries and deaths with a reduction in healthcare costs. Society also gains due to improved overall productivity from a decrease in lost workdays from illness. For physicians, the improved communication skills result in a decrease in medical liability exposure and improved career satisfaction.

Group and Team Coaching in Healthcare

Coaching a physician can be performed individually, in a group or in a team. Individual coaching is performed one on one between one coach and one physician. Group coaching is performed with a coach and 6 – 8 physicians who share common characteristics, but do not necessarily interact with one another.  Team coaching applies to an intact medical unit that functions together cohesively with a purpose. Since the coach is working with more than one person, both group and team coaching are more cost efficient than individual coaching. Team coaching can be applied in any functioning healthcare unit—including healthcare institution, medical offices or hospital emergency rooms. Given that communication errors are a root cause of greater than 50% of preventable medical injuries and deaths,  coaching the healthcare team has been shown to decrease these preventable injuries. Development and implementation of Quality Improvement initiatives is also an ideal situation for team coaching. Team coaching will not only greatly accelerate the acceptance of the QI policy with a system-wide cohesive message to the staff, but also more effectively address the resistance of physicians to change.