S3E4: When Physicians Face Litigation: Lessons in Leadership
Rahul
Welcome to Learning to Lead, a podcast about leadership, teamwork, and reimagining healthcare. This podcast is for learners, educators, and healthcare professionals interested in building leadership skills in a supportive community.
We are your hosts Rahul Anand, Maya Doyle, Peter Longley, Amber Vargas, and Brooklynn Weber.
Together we bring you conversations with emerging and established leaders, deep dives and hacks to help you become the best leader you can be.
Amber
Welcome everyone to another episode from Learning to Lead. My name is Amber Vargas and I'll be co-hosting this episode along with our several co-hosts here. So who I'll let introduce themselves.
Rahul
Hi, it's Rahul Anand.
Liza
Hi, it’s Liza Landry.
Maya
Hi, it's Maya Doyle.
Pete
Hello, it's Peter Longley.
Amber
So Dr. Gita Pensa is an Emergency Medicine physician practicing in Rhode Island since 2001. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, now Perelman School of Medicine in 1997. She continued on to residency at the combined George Washington Georgetown Emergency Medicine residency in Washington DC graduating as Chief Resident in 2021. She worked in community emergency medicine for 13 years before joining the faculty at the Warren Albert School of Medicine at Brown University in 2014. She's currently an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine. Dr. Pena is now also a physician defendant, wellbeing coach and consultant. She was the host and editor of a EM Early Access a research podcast for the Academic Emergency Medicine Journal through 2024. She's also a regular contributor to the emergency medicine reviews and perspectives and wrap and the co-host of its uc Max program at the Medical School of Brown University. She served as a Mary B. Arnold longitudinal mentor to over 40 medical students yearly until 2022. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her husband, three daughters and dog Maggie. So welcome Dr. Pensa and thank you for being here with us today.
Gita
Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm excited.
Amber
We are so excited to have you. So to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey? Why emergency medicine? When did you begin to see yourself as a leader in healthcare?
Gita
Sure. Well, I wound up becoming an Emergency Physician largely because of my older brother's influence who was also an Emergency Physician. So he's three years ahead of me and when I was in medical school, I really kind of liked everything. I really couldn't decide. I really very much enjoyed, I kind of thought I was gravitating towards critical care and my brother was the person who said, I'm going to emergency medicine. I think you should think about it. It's pretty awesome. And Penn at the time did not have an emergency medicine residency program. It was early enough that a number of schools that you may think of as sort of leaders in medical education actually did not have emergency medicine residencies because emergency medicine was sort of this late bloomer in terms of being a specialty. And so I hadn't really thought about it and I wound up rotating through the emergency department finding that I actually loved it and there was this great appeal in just being able to see different stuff for the rest of my career.
So that's really kind of what clinched it for me. Then I did my residency. I was the educational chief resident at GW Georgetown when I graduated and I had this full expectation to take an academic position and my husband got a fellowship at Brown. He became a GI doctor. And when I came up here for reasons I won't get into, I sort of interviewed at the academic ship and I was supposed to be the second full-time female faculty member that they had. And I was expecting a child and I got some funny vibes about the whole thing and I decided I'm going to take this community job over here, which was a real detour that I did not expect. And then it turns out that I loved that place. And so I was a nocturnists there. I worked as I did nights for a number of years and then I transitioned into regular emergency medicine shift work.
And I don't think I really saw myself as much of a leader. I just was trying to practice good medicine and be a good doctor in the community. And about five years after I graduated from residency, I saw a patient that was going to completely change the trajectory of my entire life and my career. And it was a young woman who had had a really strange set of medical complaints and I spent a lot of time with her and I knew at the time it was kind of strange and I imaged her and I made a plan with a consultant and then I wound up discharging this person hoping that the consultant was going to see her at nine. And then she didn't make it there. She actually went home and she had a pretty massive stroke at the age of 31.
So yeah, so I became the defendant in a lawsuit where there was an extraordinary demand initially for $28 million. This is back in 2006, 2007. And I didn't know the first thing about litigation. I'd never been taught anything about it other than some basic risk management principles. And I that began this sort of descendant to madness I guess. And the case wound up lasting 12 years. And I went to trial in 2011 and again in 2018. And even though I won at both trials, I would say that there was this real transformational process between trial A and trial B that truly changed me and made me realize that we don't teach about this the way that we ought to be. We don't think about this the way that perhaps would be more helpful. And the shame around the topic of litigation and medicine is holding us all back and creating so much distress for people. And the majority of doctors will wind up in a lawsuit at some point. And so it makes sense that we prepare for it and we teach about it and we talk about it openly, but we're not there yet. So that is, I think that's where if I can be considered a leader in this particular arena, I think that's the origin story.
Liza
Wow, so much of what you said is so interesting and with litigation and feeling that increase in responsibility that you talk about in medical school and then in residency, and I'm sure that there's another huge jump when you become an attending. Is there anything that you wish you could tell medical students or people who are going into medicine and what that change in responsibility feels like and how you navigated that and kind of coped with that?
Gita
Oh, that's really interesting. So I think that as you come into residency as an intern, you know that you don't know enough. And that's frightening because you're going to be assigned some responsibilities and you don't feel quite ready for them except that you're always sort of reaching to show that you're able to handle the responsibility. And so this can be very challenging, but at least you're not expected to know everything. And I think for me in my career, my probably peak cockiness was I did a four year residency. And so somewhere about the middle of fourth year of residency, I kind of thought I was the bomb. I was like, I'm really good at this. I can run the emergency department. I'm so ready. And then my first weekend alone, there's a meme, I don't know if you've ever seen it, and it has a little cute little cat and maybe this is just being fed to me, but I thought it was hysterical and it was this cat looking so for Lauren, and it said, the moment when you look around for the attending and you realize it's me and I want to find the attendee attending to help.
But that's a huge transition and for me, wow, was it a trial by fire? Because I took this job where I was, it was in the community. I was a nocturnists and I was the only doctor in the hospital at night, so I would have to run the emergency department. I did not have a PA or NP or any other. I had nurses and me and T and me. And then I would also have to go from the emergency department upstairs when there was any sort of critical situation while we were waiting for that doctor to come in from home. We did not have hospitals in those days. So I would go upstairs to run a code or if someone did an airway, I would go do that. Or if someone was on labor and delivery, I would have to leave the department and catch a baby waiting for the OB to come in.
And this was terrifying because all of a sudden I was supposed to be the person that actually did know everything and I knew that I didn't. And that's just sort of this dunning Kruger love. The more you know, the more you realize you don't know. And so coming to peace with that of there was some struggle, there was some real struggle. I can remember, I didn't know enough the first night, but going back the second night, I told my husband, I don't think I could do this. I don't want to go. I really feel like I should quit right now. And he had to give me the pep talk of like, well, I'm a fellow and make no money. We just bought a house and we have a baby, so someone's got to go to work. I really think it should be you. But then also you're as well-trained if you don't go, they won't have anybody
And you do know how to do this as well as anybody else does. So just show up and do your best. That's what I kept doing day after day after day shift after shift after shift. But the trouble was the litigation thing really kind of took that cut the wind out of my sails a lot, and that really set me back to square one where I was really much less confident in my own decision, making much less sure of myself, a lot of second guessing, a lot of analysis paralysis, and I did not feel like quite the hot shot that I had.
Liza
Yeah, I can imagine that would take a toll. After going through that, how did you navigate building your confidence back up after going through the litigation that you went through?
Gita
I did not do it very well, and it took a really, really long time. And part of it is, and this is largely why I do the work I do now, is that I didn't have any support, any understanding you're instructed when you're sued to not talk to anybody. And we're pretty good rule followers, so we don't, and I didn't just showed up. If I could have quit, I think I would've, but we had loans and a baby and a mortgage and I felt this responsibility, I have to show up, but I didn't want to show up. And so I would pull up to the ER and cry in my car and then get out and just white knuckle my way through a shift, just completely terrified of everything. And that is not a feeling that left me for many, many, many years. It really probably wasn't until after the first trial when I decided that I was going to figure out a different way to be with this because I had been really dealing with this entity that now I know is called litigation stress. But I'd been dealing with that for the better part of a decade and I'd really missed a lot of my own life and certainly the enjoyment of my career. But it's pretty amazing how somebody with a lot of grit and determination, as most of us can keep showing up to a job that you are unhappy at day in and day out because you feel like you have the responsibility to do so. But you could do that for a really, really long time. And unfortunately some people will spend a career like that.
Amber
Are there things that would've made you feel more supported or that would've helped you in that situation?
Gita
I can identify a number of things that I think would've helped over time. First of all, some institutions now have peer support around adverse events and litigation. That's sort of like an up and coming area, but we recognize now that these really terrible adverse events and litigation are kind of occupational hazards. And so if you look at the responsibility of the workplace to ensure the safety of their workers, not just from violence, which is obviously a problem too, especially in emergency medicine, but from these really traumatic experiences that are part and parcel of our work, then the institutions I think have a responsibility to create systems of support around them. And so that's something that we're just waking up to now. So if there had been something like that available to me, that would've been marvelous. I think if one of my instructors had ever talked openly about getting sued or about it in real time if it were happening to them.
Most of our learning in medicine is really, it's kind of generational. You learn stuff in medical school, but then wait, when you get to residency, what you're going to do is pick the attendings that you want to be like and then you're going to model yourself after them. That's how we learn. We pick who our mentors are going to be and then we try to be like them. And I think if I'd ever had someone that I thought of as a role model who also got sued or was open about litigation and how they were coping with it and that it was difficult, but there were strategies to move forward with it or during it, I think that would've been pretty amazing. But I had nothing. I had no one. And the feeling then is that if it doesn't happen, you might know the numbers, but if you've never seen anybody do it, there's still a feeling of this does not happen to our people.
So you still feel like a pariah. You're still really just the shame is really overpowering. So I think if there were just anyone who in my people not, maybe someone might've done an abstract lecture, even me when I go to institutions and I talk about this, it's really different then if someone that you know and admire is telling you about their experience. And notably I think in real time, which is something that a lot of people have a lot of trouble with right now, but I think that would be marvelous because you can't talk about maybe the details of your case, but you can talk about the experience, you can talk about how it's making you feel, and we avoid all of that. So that would've been truly instrumental. And three, if I knew one thing about litigation before I wound up in it in terms of the system, how to perform as a defendant, what it means, what it doesn't mean, what it means about me as a doctor, what it doesn't mean about me as a doctor, if I knew any of that, I think it would've gone a long way. And so that is the lens that I work through now. I help systems with their peer support development. I work with people in terms of dealing with the shame of litigation and how to move forward in performance. And I teach the skills required to be a good defendant. And I think everybody should be a good defendant. There's no shame in that. I think we should all know how to operate in this arena.
Liza
Kind going off of that, can you just talk about a little bit, we've talked about litigation a lot and kind of thrown the word around. Can you kind of help us define what's the purpose of litigation healthcare and how do you feel like it gets misused and why?
Gita
That's a big question. So civil litigation in the United States, right? So medical malpractice litigation is under the umbrella of civil litigation, something called tort law. And tort law is really a means of dispute resolution in the courts. That's all it's right. And so civil litigation is supposed to be mostly about money. Just party A over here feels like they were wronged somehow by party B, and you have to use this system if they can't figure it out on their own. You use the courts to say, is party B liable? We use the word liable for the damages to party A, and if so, how much money? Because you can't, whatever the damages, if it was someone who was harmed medically, you can't necessarily fix that, but what would be a reasonable transactional amount of money? So truly the civil litigation system is kind of supposed to be transactional.
It's not supposed to be punitive. And it was never meant this is a huge mistake. It was never meant to adjudicate whether or not the medical care in a case was good because the jury doesn't understand medicine, the judge doesn't understand medicine. You are not being adjudicated by anyone that understands medicine. And so it becomes largely about optics and the battle of dueling experts and the jury of laypeople who will have to look at all of these disparate facts being presented to them and sort of come up with a decision. And we have unfortunately equated the outcomes of civil litigation with whether or not care was good, and it was never meant to do that. So when someone settles a case, there is this sort of general feeling amongst the public that they must have done something wrong. And that is in fact often not the case.
This is just a means to say, okay, we have this dispute and neither one of us wants to keep going through this process. So how about we give you this amount of money? And we both call it a day. That happens a lot in court. Most of the time in civil litigation, you're going to court because you feel like you want to defend your care, which is very different from other arenas of the law, but you go to trial in an effort to defend what you believe to be good care. And the doctor does win the majority of the time that is true, but sometimes they don't. In cases where you really thought that you were going to, and that can obviously be devastating, but then that goes in the paper and everybody assumes that the doctor did something horrible because there was a $3 million verdict against them or something like that.
And we in medicine haven't really talked about it openly enough to realize that that's not what this was for. But we got here because we totally abdicated our responsibility for creating a system that actually adjudicates care. And we probably need to address that. And there are some efforts out there if you read about the Michigan model of Rick Boothman, but there are attempts in institutions now to restore the ability to communicate between the injured patient and the caregiver. But the traditional litigation route completely gets rid of the dispute resolution part that's supposed to come before you go to court.
Amber
So after you realized that this was important to you, that there needs to be more education around litigation, we need to be talking about this. How did you start this new journey? Where did you begin?
Gita
Well, that was sort of an accidental story, and I'm not sure I made the decision before I started walking in a certain direction, but part of it started because I realized that I was in real trouble when I actually got the news that I won at trial the first time. Then there was an appeal, the plaintiff side appealed, and then I went through all the layers of court in my state, and then when I got the news in 2015 that they were overturning my verdicts and I had to go back to trial, I literally lost my mind. I actually just completely freaked out.
And that was the beginning of this decision that I could not be like this anymore because I felt like I was actually in danger. And I had spent so many years, and this is something that we know that litigation actually is. We have data now to support that. Litigation is a driver of suicide in physicians. Physicians have sort of a suicide problem, and it's a driver of suicide. It is a driver of substance use and abuse. It's a driver of relationship harm, divorce, and certainly a driver of career abandonment, but no one, no one's talking about it. But me as this person, this isolated person in the system, I realized that I was actually, not only had I just been unhappy for a long time, but I was actually in a really dangerous place and I did make the decision that I had to change something.
I had to look for something outside of myself that was going to, I'd been doing this as doctors often do, is just figuring out in my own head, I'm going to figure this out. And I was not. So for the first time I realized I think I might have to get out of my own horrible echo chamber of a mind and learn some things. And so it started with a very sort of, I read a book about litigation that had been published called When Good Doctors Get Sued. And someone had given it to me ages before and I had not read that thing. In fact, that was the first thing I did was like, I'm going to go read this book and I'm going to see if there's anything in there for me. And lo and behold, there was, and so that sort of started this like, oh, okay, well, and I call this sort of the breaking of the self-help seal, where I started to realize perhaps other people could give me some information that would be useful to me in this scenario.
And maybe it's not coming from medicine, it could be coming from somewhere else. So I kind of made a study about how one digs out of misery and burnout and all of that stuff. And then as part of that, more and more, the better I felt, then I decided I got to figure out what to do with medicine. I have to figure out am I going to love it or leave it. And as part of that, I wound up joining Brown's academic faculty, and I dunno, mix it up. I had always sort of felt that I'd been destined to be a teacher and that was the avenue I was going. And here it was 13 years later and I hadn't done it. So I was like, well, maybe if I reengage with that, I'll like that. When I showed up and I was talking to the residency director and saying, I'd really like to do this, but I don't have an academic niche.
I'm a generalist. I'm a good generalist, but I don't have any special research skills. I don't know any of this stuff anymore. She suggested that I become the social media educational technology person. So this is around 2015 ish. I knew nothing about it, but this is sort of my new like, all right, I'll try, I guess. And so I took classes at Brown's Instructional Technology Group and I started learning a lot about using social media for education and educational technology stuff. And then the residents wanted to make a blog. So we did that and then they wanted to make a podcast. So I learned how to podcast, and that was actually the thing that started me on this path to really being, having the career that I do today, is because as I approached trial the second time, I had this idea of I wonder, I'm feeling more comfortable.
I want to teach about this. I gave the residents a couple of lectures, and then I felt like, well, wow, what if I made a podcast about this thing and I had learned how to edit, I did all the audio editing and stuff like that. You couldn't do it out of a box then. So I had to learn how to audio edit and that kind of stuff. So it really was like this creative flex. And then after I went to trial a second time, I released this podcast and I didn't do it through Brown. I did this as a side just passion project, and it got passed around a lot and it still is. And so now we get about 10,000 downloads a month. So I know they use it as a teaching tool and insurance companies use it, resonate programs use it, people just find it and they passed around to people they think need it. So that was a long answer to your story, but that's kind of how it all went down. And by the time I went to trial the second time, I was a totally different person. I had studied tort law, legal performance. I knew exactly how to show up. I invited my residents to come to trial to watch me testify. And it's funny, the junior residents were like, could you do that again next year so that we could also come?
Please? No, thank you. So it was a really incremental, I did not set off for any of this to happen. And really it was just once you decide I need to move from this place, just picking a direction and just walking in it and just making decision after decision after decision with a very different lens of I need to go somewhere from here and this is where I wound up.
Amber
Thank you for being so vulnerable. The first time I heard you speak at Brown, I was like, oh my goodness, you made such an impact on my life. And I'm like, I've never heard someone talk about these things and say it's okay to be feeling these things, but here's how I did it and here's how you can do it too. So thank you. Thank you for that. And I'm sure that so many people are going to benefit from listening to your podcast, from listening to you here and from meeting you. Oh my goodness. I hope we continue to cross paths.
Gita
Oh, Amber, I hope so. I hope so.
Rahul
It just strikes me how at the beginning of this story, when it happened the first time, you are not talking to anybody, you're by yourself. It's a big black cloud over you and how you turned that, as you said, digging out of misery to this time when you are learning about it, teaching about it, you actually have your residents in the room with you as you're testifying. Oh my goodness, what a concept that is. Hats off to you.
Gita
Thank you. I think the whole thing, at some point I felt empowered to try to make the thing I wish I had. And recognizing when you come out of that place of misery and complete just, I call it with the people I coach, I call it the snow globe, where everything, you shake the thing up and everything is just swirling around and you couldn't pick one feeling, thought anything out of that whole storm. And when you come to a place of clarity about what was going on in there and what the reality is, then you can start, I think, to make meaning out of it. People talk about finding meaning. I believe that we make meaning. And when you make meaning out of it, then I think you're in, you're prepared then to you make this narrative that then propels you in a direction. And a lot of what I do, I think is just showing people, there's another narrative.
I think that we have this very default narrative in medicine. I can't tell you how many people I've met who say my plan was to practice until I got sued and then I was going to quit. It's super common, and I might've had that in there somewhere except I got sued right out of residency. I mean five years, but still it felt like I was still young and new. And I really think that the ability to talk about it comes from being able to come out of that really shaken up place and recognize this is something that is almost a universal experience eventually in medicine. And if you don't experience it, you fear it, but we aren't talking about it. And so then I guess I felt empowered to start talking, and then the more you talk about it, the easier it gets to talk about.
And so what I hope to do eventually is to make that a norm, because I actually think that that will really impact the way that younger people in medicine show up to deal with it when it happens to them if they show up knowing that they're truly not alone and that they don't need to be isolated and that they deserve to be supported through the process, whether or not they were responsible for whatever the harm was. There's always going to be difficult stuff to contend with, but the shame and the isolation is what makes it just so much more dangerous than it I think inherently needs to be. And then also our sort of ignorance and naivete about the whole thing and how it works.
Rahul
Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And I'm completing the quote. It's in pieces that you're sharing, but digging out of misery by finding meaning and then making the thing you wish you had first for yourself and then for others.
Gita
Yeah, thanks for that condensed quote.
Rahul
And sometimes that is leadership that you have just two or three bad options. There is no good option, and you have to then cook that conflict and take people along with you choosing the best you can. But any of the choices you would make collectively is going to make some people unhappy at you. And like you showed here, the two options, one was to keep practicing until you face litigation and then quit. And the other option is not even getting your hat in the ring or doing anything for the fear of litigation, and none of them is good for the healthcare professional or good for the community that they serve.
Gita
No, it doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good to always be operating from this place of fear. And so what we don't do is actually unpack that fear. We have this undifferentiated fear and no available resource really to just sort of help us break down the thing that we're afraid of. And that's where I think that we could do a lot of work in terms of education and preparation.
Liza
And I think that kind of goes into the concept of resilience. When we were reading up on your work and your podcast and the different talks you give, it seems like you come back to resilience a lot, and it's something that's brought up I think a lot throughout medical training as kind of this ambiguous concept of we need to be resilient, we need to build resilience. But how do you feel is the best way, or do you have any advice on how to build that resilience and what that means to you?
Gita
So I think that if you are here, if you are studying this, if you are becoming a doctor or a nurse or another healthcare professional, you are already quite resilient. And it's tough to ask people to continue to just take all the hits and just be as resilient as you can. I'm not sure that's really quite the answer, but I do think that when there is something like this that you weren't expecting, that's probably when you feel like it ought not to have happened or you should be better prepared for this, and you're judging yourself for being in the situation. It is harder to be resilient. It's much harder when you're judging yourself about the event, judging yourself, about feeling the way you do, about being sued, judging yourself when you're judging yourself. That is not really a place where you can rise to, I'll just be resilient through this.
Like, no, that's not how you feel. You're telling yourself, your inner critic is telling yourself all the ways in which you are messing this thing up, and that is not a place where you can actually really foster a lot of resilience from. I don't know that it's possible in all circumstances to just be resilient. I think that's too big an ask. But I do think that it's a great frame to say that I believe that I am a resilient person. I know that there is probably something that I can learn or do that might help me. Let me look for those solutions. Like maybe I don't giving yourself the grace, which I did not for many years, but giving yourself the grace to realize I am not doing this in a way that's super helpful to me, but I know about myself that I am a resilient person.
I am a worthy person. I am a good doctor. I know these things to be true, and litigation honestly should not be, or actually even truly error, which is going to happen in every single career, should not be the thing that shakes those foundational beliefs. They have to get baked into that foundational belief. I know these events are coming at some point, and they will be very difficult to contend with, but they don't change who I am and they don't change all the good that I am doing in the world and that I aspire to continue doing in this work. And knowing who you are and your worth and not letting this outside business, which we can get into what it means and what it doesn't mean, but not letting that shake your foundational belief in who you are and the good that you do, that is where your resilience is going to come from. So I don't often use the, I don't advise people, I want you to be more resilient. That's not going to work. But I think that the more we can convince people that it's okay to continue to believe in themselves during, despite these processes, they will find their resilience.
Liza
That's beautiful. I love your emphasis on just trusting yourself and having such a strong sense of self that it allows you something to fall back onto.
Gita
Well, it's interesting you asked me about in training, becoming more confident in training. Nothing will shake your confidence in your own abilities like litigation will, because we never know enough. You always feel like, could somebody else have done it better or is there another doctor out there that would've done something differently? Would somebody have felt health have been able to catch this thing, or would they not have made this mistake? That kind of chatter we indulge in a lot as perfectionists in this arena. So learning to recognize that and to still sort of, I am learning and I also have value. I'm learning, just like my husband said on day two, like, you do this as well as anybody else. I used to go back to work, but recognizing there's no perfection, even though we're always striving for it, that's great, but there is no perfection. There is no arrival. But you go to work every single day armed with information, always striving to be better, keeping the patient at the center of your decision making and leading yourself with your values. That's who you are at whatever stage you are in this whole thing and recognizing that that is worth it is not easily, you are the person that will let that fritter away. You are the person that has control over that. Then don't let it go easy.
Amber
What are some of the key non-negotiable principles or practices that you live by?
Gita
Okay, well, I just say I aspire to live by, I don't get it right every time, but I think it's interesting in my fifties now, and I've finally realized that, oh, we keep growing and evolving. And I think one of the focuses today has really been of conflict. And one of the things that I aspire to do now when I am in conflict, I used to be kind of a hothead tell you the truth. I've learned, and we can learn these skills as we go along. I've learned to approach conflict a little differently and to think about when I'm going to have a tough conversation, what is it that I need in this conversation? And I try to think, what does the other person in this situation also need? And this actually will change my language. It changes my lens, it changes my perspective. It's really broadened my perspective with a lot of people and my patients, the people that I work with, the people that I live with is trying to put myself, not just putting myself in my shoes, but thinking, what do they need?
I have needs here in this conversation. What does that person need? And so that's something that's a work in progress. I'm aspiring to, as I continue to evolve, learning how to navigate conflict like that has definitely made me, I am better at it than I used to be. I think a little more strategic, but also I think that that's more in keeping with who I want to be. And when I say your values, I value integrity. I value honesty. I value inclusion. I value that every single person has a story and a perspective. And if I allow myself to really lead with those as my intention, when I approach these hard conversations, I do better.
Rahul
I love that principle of yours, and it reminds me of the concept of dignity, which is so important when people are in conflict that how can we hold this conversation in a way that upholds my dignity and the dignity of the others involved?
Amber
Perfect. Yeah. Something we speak about in our leadership curriculum a lot is staying on your side of the net. So this is what's going on on this side. That's what's going on that side. And lets understand that.
Gita
Yeah, I like that. Really clean and keeping your side of the net clean. Yeah.
Amber
Well, thank you so much. Thank you for your time and for your expertise today. It was a pleasure getting to know you and your journey. Dr. Pensa, if someone wanted to listen to your podcast, how can they do so?
Gita
They can search for it by name. It's called Doctors and Litigation: The L Word, and if they Google it, they'll find it. It's on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and my website is doctors and litigation.com.
Amber
Thank you so much, Dr. Pensa. It's a pleasure. Pleasure meeting you. Everyone on this call, thank you for engaging in the discussion.
Gita
I appreciate that. Good luck to everybody.
Brooke
Thank you for listening to our show. Learning to Lead is a production of the Quinnipiac University podcast studio, in partnership with the Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences.
Creators of this show are Rahul Anand, Maya Doyle, Peter Longley, Amber Vargas and Brooklynn Weber.
The student producer is Brooklynn Weber, and the executive producer is David DesRoches.
Connect with us on social media @LearningToLeadPod or email us at LearningToLeadPod@quinnipiac.edu.