EP 213: What Role Does Humor Play in Healthcare?

What does humor play in healthcare? Everything! Without humor, working in healthcare can drain our energy. A good laugh while working or seeing funny and comical things helps our healthcare professionals ease up even a little bit.

As nurses, our jobs require us to deal with stress almost 24/7. Finding humor in our actions helps us stay sane and make it through the day. It’s also a good feeling to laugh after a stressful day, so humor is important in this line of work. 

In this episode, we would like to introduce you to Jim Fulmer. Jim is currently a  board-certified Internal medicine hospitalist who has worked with nurses in a lot of different healthcare settings over a long career. 

He has had experience working in health care in the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky, Australia, and Alaska, public health, traditional office practice, research, and in various leadership roles as a hospitalist.

He is also a medical cartoonist on Instagram and has created a hospital-themed board game and card game called Doctor Wars. 

Questions for Our Guest

The questions below are some we’d like to tackle. We often go off-topic, so we don’t expect to hit them all. If you have any ideas, please let us know.

Looking forward to our conversation!

These are the questions you had in Calendly. We’ll go off your questions and wherever else our conversation goes.

1. Can you give us a background about yourself and some of the experiences you’ve had throughout your career?
2. How has your perspective on medicine and healthcare changed over your career?  
3. Was there a point in your career when you realized that the way you interact with people and the way you treat them is just as important as the treatment you give? 
4. What do you think about the insurance side of healthcare? 
   •  Insurance can be frustrating to patients and healthcare workers. Time to evaluate the patient is less and less, and the most important factor for the quality of the care of the patient is the TIME you spend with them…now we are focusing more on documentation and coding system than actual care. 
5. What made you start, and what is the Doctors Wars game? 
   • You recently posted if musical instruments were healthcare specialties,  were humor and education something you were always passionate about? 

Ending Questions

Before we end the show, we have one last question we like to ask all our guests.

If you had the opportunity to have a Cup of coffee with anybody one last time, who would it be & why? 

Links: 

https://www.instagram.com/doctorwarsgame

https://www.doctorwars.com/ 

To watch the full episode, click here for the full video 👇👇

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Introduction
01:52 About James Fulmer
08:58 The distinction between working in hospitals and rural places
12:17 Adapting and respecting multiple cultures as a travel health professional
16:21 The very complex problem of improving healthcare
18:28 Why is improving healthcare such a challenge in the face of a massive project?
22:19 Using our talent to improve everything around us
25:42 Is medicine’s future headed in the right direction?
37:45 Can a single-payer system solve one of healthcare’s problems?
42:49 There is no perfect healthcare system
44:52 Bias decisions in healthcare
48:26 The pros and cons of social media and humor
53:45 How Jim came up with the card game
1:00:05 Wrapping up the show