Jack of No Trades, Master of One: Is specialization always the answer?
Are you a specialist? Or a generalist? Are you a speech-language pathologist, a speech-language pathologist, or a speech-language pathologist? Specialization is all the rage in healthcare. Digging deep into one specific area gives us the depth we need to be an expert. But the deeper we go into that hole and eventually, it becomes difficult to see outside of it. This prevents us from communicating effectively with all the other specializations in order to get a full understanding of the patient. Without a full understanding, we can’t provide complete care.
Putting in the Work
We live in a society that often encourages us to start doing things “early and often” in order to get a leg-up on the competition. If you were in competitive sports, played music at an elite level, or went to a pressure-cooker school, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The work of becoming great in any one thing forces you to put in the hours like a corporate lawyer (without the fat paycheck). But it can be worth it depending on your goals.
Hard Skills VS Soft Skills
Becoming highly skilled in a specific area such as sports or music makes sense. These skills are considered hard skills and thus the components that we want to build are easy to identify and measure. The more you do it, the better you get at it. Practice, practice, practice, and at a certain point your brain and your body will be made for it. But being specialized in speech pathology isn’t the same thing as being specialized in a sport. In fact, specializing in only one career area can create blinders that make you narrow-minded and short-sighted. Maybe instead of such intense specialization in one area, what we really need is a broad foundation of knowledge that gives us “Range” which improves insight and flexibility. Unlike sports and music, medical speech pathology is mostly comprised of soft skills (e.g. communication, emotional intelligence, and creativity). Soft skills are more difficult to identify and measure. BUT, for the SLP, they are just as real and WAY more important.
Where has Specialization Taken Us?
Specialization in healthcare has led to parallel trenches. Yes, you can dig deep into your area, but can you see outside of the hole you’ve dug in order to connect with all the other disciplines? When we get stuck in these holes care becomes inefficient, expensive, and disorganized leading us to become ineffective at best and harmful at worst. This issue may be worse for the elderly because as people get older they tend to have multiple health conditions for which multiple treatments can interact negatively with one another. Practitioners may recommend tests that are redundant or prescribe medicine without knowing what other medications the patient is on. Similarly, if SLPs become hyper-focused on the swallow while ignoring the rest of the patient, we may recommend modified diets without fully understanding the impact this has on nutrition, hydration, quality of life and the way medication is released into the bloodstream.
Get into the Melting Pot
Don’t get me wrong, specialization is important. It allows us to become experts and highly effective in a given area. But the human body is endlessly complex and healthcare is a melting pot that doesn’t work well in silos. Quality care is built on the foundation of a diverse and interwoven team of professionals. The SLP who is most effective will be the one who has sharp communication skills and a broad knowledge base to weave in and out of other disciplines to manage the patient as a whole. Here are some key takeaways to get yourself out of the hole of specialization we’ve dug for ourselves and into the melting pot:
Get outside your head- take time to study medical areas that aren’t within our scope of practice. There are many ways to get a good understanding of various topics ranging across the healthcare continuum (i.e. free or cheap online courses, blogs, or hospital-sponsored continuing education. Pro tip: it’s OK if it doesn’t count towards your CEUs).
Know your neighbors- take time to mingle with your interdisciplinary team (IDT) colleagues in order to connect and understand them better. Ask them questions, listen carefully, and take notes. If you do this enough times a steady stream of information should give you some basic themes to help you understand what’s important to them and what to look out for. As a bonus, it may even make you some friends and improve your communication within the IDT.
Conduct thought experiments- This one is a personal favorite of mine. The human brain is truly incredible, but its capability is limited and at risk of tripping over many cognitive biases. Thought experiments shield us from these biases. For example, “social experimentation” involves taking time to truly think like another team member. With a specific issue in mind, think about how they might respond to it and what types of information might be important to them. Seeing a problem from someone else’s perspective opens you up to thoughts and ideas that would normally be suppressed by your own biases. To learn more about some of the other top thought experiments, click here.
Broaden Your Scope
There is a ton we can do to broaden our scope without compromising the deep knowledge needed to do our jobs. There’s always more to learn, but focusing on the areas outside of our typical concentration makes you a more valuable member of the diverse IDT and thus allows you to provide better care for the patient. Jack of all trades gets a bad rap. But the first recorded use of the phrase was actually used to describe somebody you may have heard of: William Shakespeare. His passion extended to so many different areas of life he was deemed a failure before he was given a chance to shine. And shine he did. Let’s all get outside of our heads, understand the impressive people we work with, and figure out ways we can get out of our holes and broaden our scope.
