Run an effective meeting
Sooner or later, as a medical staff leader, you will be called upon to run a meeting. It may be in the service of directly carrying out a key responsibility delegated to the medical staff by the governing board. Or it may be that the meeting is required to meet some standard of a regulatory or accreditation body. Whatever the reason, it is your obligation to ensure that the meeting is well run given the time and costs associated with the meeting. Many medical staffs bemoan the fact there are too many meetings that are poorly run, poorly attended, generally a waste of time, and often without any definitive outcome(s). Do you want this to be the assessment of a meeting run by you? Or is there a better way?
Regularly scheduled meetings are often held out of habit or tradition. They quickly can become meaningless unless there are critically or strategically important issues to discuss or compelling decisions to be made. Meeting frequency is often codified in outdated medical staff governance documents calling for weekly or monthly meetings when quarterly meetings or less may suffice. A starting point may be to alter those documents to read “XYZ committee shall meet [specify frequen¬cy: quarterly or biannually or annually] and more frequently if needed.” This turns the meeting frequency equation on its head to a minimum that can be exceeded and not a maximum that needs to be slavishly met because the bylaws say so. The only exceptions to this would be external accred¬itation or regulatory standards that dictate certain meetings must occur with a specifically defined frequency.