Extending Beyond the Operating Room
written by David Terry, DO, Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder of The Surgicalist Group
For most general surgeons our inner compass is programmed to serve. It may have come to us innately, as part our DNA, or it evolved as a learned behavior from residency or fellowship. Either way, it’s part of what makes us tick. As an organization, The Surgicalist Group’s surgeons learned what’s important to us over the years. Being an early stage organization, we decided it was time to codify our core values and start to share these with our teams, along with our vision and mission. As each new surgicalist team comes onboard now, we share and gather stories about our core values which are: compassion, stewardship, innovation, and quality. We’ve found storytelling to be a powerful way to help us understand how our organizational core values play out in our behaviors IRL (in real-life).
Oklahoma City, OK
Recently, we met with one of our surgicalists at Mercy Health in Oklahoma City, Dr. Jake Abbott. When Dr. Abbott joined our team in 2019, he was one of the founders of our program at Mercy Health. The single factor driving Dr. Abbott to leave his busy practice in the Dallas-Fort Worth area was the ability to regain control of his life. He wanted to spend more time with his family and carve out time for his local mission work in his hometown of Oklahoma City. Having a week-on/week-off schedule was attractive to Dr. Abbott from the first time we talked about the opportunity to join our organization. The appeal of being a surgeon founded and led organization, along with our core values, Dr. Abbott decided to join our organization and relocate his family to Oklahoma City where he was raised.
In the startup phase at Mercy Health we were able to assist in more areas than just emergent and urgent surgery. Dr. Abbott worked with the local rehab facilities and Mercy’s long-term acute care hospital to manage care for their patients. He also helped one of Mercy’s community surgeons as she started building her bariatric surgery practice working as the first assist general surgeon. Just recently when we spoke with Dr. Abbott, he shared with us the details of his next mission trip and we are excited to see how he applies his gifts and talents to the people of Oklahoma City. Dr. Abbott is an exemplar to how we live our core values every day to benefit the Oklahoma City community we serve.
