Sarah Temkin, MD is a first-time filmmaker, director and producer. She was trained as a gynecologic oncologist and spent over 2 decades providing surgical and medical care for women with cancer of the female genital tract. She held leadership positions in academic medicine, served on multiple national committees and is widely published in the medical literature. She has contributed throughout her career to conversations about equity in healthcare, including gender equity within the physician workforce. She was inspired to make the award-winning short documentary film 1001cuts, informed by her lived experience, after leaving clinical practice in 2020.

In this episode, Dr. Temkin

- Shares her reasons for leaving clinical medicine and making the film 1000cuts

- Explains how working with instruments that weren't designed for them became apparent as one of the many "cuts" women surgeons face during the course of their careers

- Emphasizes that having diversity of people, thought and practice in the OR makes things better for everyone, including our patients

- Discusses how a lot of progress has been made regarding making intrumentation in the OR more inclusive but that we still have work to do

You can reach Dr. Temkin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-temkin-214a76309/

Learn more about Dr. Temkin's film : https://www.1001cuts.org/

Watch the trailer for the film 1001cuts: https://www.videoproject.org/1001-cuts.html or alternatively you could just share the film website which has links to accessing the film through the film.

Webinar on stapler issues: https://www.societyofsurgicalergonomics.org/ and scroll down to the section Surgical Stapler Design and Usability

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Dr. Josh Mezrich is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin and holds the Mark A. Fischer Chair in Transplantation. His surgical interests include liver transplantation, kidney transplantation and laparoscopic donor nephrectomy. He is the surgical director of the living donor kidney program. He runs a translational science lab investigating the role of the microbiome and serum biomarkers on organ quality in brain dead donors. He is the inventor and co-founder of the MezLight (www.mezlight.com), a sterile surgical task light designed to provide high-definition illumination of surgical fields and ease the physical burden on surgeons.

Josh’s first book, When Death Becomes Life, was published by HarperCollins on January 15, 2019, and has sold in 12 countries outside the United States. His second book, Every Living Creature: How Xenotransplantation Will Change Our Lives, will be published in spring of 2026.

In this episode, Dr. Mezrich

- Discusses the issues with current lighting options in the OR and how they prompted his interest in inventing a new one

- Provides us with a list of attributes the wanted the new light to have, including not needing to be placed on the surgeon's head

- Describes his journey from the initial prototype of Mezlight to the currently available model

- Explains the challenges and opportunities faced by clinicians on an entrepreneurial journey

- Elaborates on his best practices for improved ergonomics in the OR including emphasizing the importance of microbreaks

Dr. Mezrich can be reached at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-mezrich-555498190/

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Dr. Kris Chrouser is an Associate Professor in Urology and the S. Matthew Berge Research Professor at the University of Michigan and the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System. Her research aims to maximize surgical outcomes by optimizing surgeon performance, intraoperative teamwork, and surgeon wellbeing. In addition to teaching operative urology, she also educates trainees in surgical ergonomics, non-technical skills, and improving workplace wellbeing by utilizing quality improvement techniques. She serves as site director for the VA surgery CRQS program and is the High Reliability Organizational (HRO) Clinician Champion at the Ann Arbor VA.

In this episode, Dr. Chrouser

- Familiarizes us with the Surgical Stress Effects model that she developed to study the impact of various factors (including intangibles) that can influence surgical and procedural outcomes

- Discusses how surgeon/proceduralist discomfort can affect non-technical (and sometimes technical) performance and many safety events can be traced to issues with communication and other non-technical skills

- Explains why we don't have quantitative data regarding how physician work-related musculoskeletal (MSK) injury can affect patient outcomes i.e. lack of reporting

- Reviews the prevalence of work-related MSK injuries among urologists and shares tips and trick to help mitigate the risks

- Highlights the importance of an "Occupational time-out" after the pre-incision time-out in order to help optimize the environmental factors

- Shares the (unpublished) data from her study implementing ergonomic best practices among OR teams

You can reach Dr. Chrouser via email at chrouser@med.umich.edu

You can access the OR stretch app at https://orstretch.mayoclinic.org/

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Follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram and Facebook and please reach out to us if you have any suggestions regarding episode ideas and guests or if you'd like to be a guest on the show