The Rebrand, Part 1: The Only Constant is Change Description
Drs. Williams, Guthrie, and Greene discuss change which includes what has been happening with the practice in the past few years, some of the dynamics that have changed since the practice has changed, and more.
The Rebrand, Part 1: The Only Constant is Change Transcription
Dr. Mironda Williams:
Welcome to Take Good Care Podcast, an endeavor that grew out of our love for obstetrics and gynecology. Our aim and mission is to serve as a source of vital information for women of all races, ages, and walks in life.
I am Dr. Mironda Williams.
Dr. Deanna Guthrie:
I’m Dr. Deanna Guthrie.
Dr. Karen Greene:
And I am Dr. Karen Greene.
Welcome to our show.
Dr. Guthrie:
Welcome to our show.
Dr. Williams:
Welcome to our show.
Welcome to this recording of Take Good Care Podcast. I’m Dr. Mironda Williams.
Dr. Guthrie:
I’m Dr. Deanna Guthrie.
Dr. Greene:
And I am Dr. Karen Greene.
Dr. Williams:
Before we launch into today’s information that we’ll be going through, just thought I’d check in with everyone and see how we’re all doing. We are at this time that we’re doing recording a little over halfway through our year. So how’s everybody doing, Dr. Guthrie?
Dr. Guthrie:
Doing okay. Less stress. It’s coming down a little bit, so I’m good.
Dr. Williams:
Dr. Greene?
Dr. Guthrie:
Trying to enjoy my summer.
Dr. Williams:
Good.
Dr. Greene:
To me, summer’s over, so I’m actually enjoying, not summer, so although the weather here still apparently wants to be summer. But I realized that I like a schedule that I know what’s going to happen. And summer for me, it was too much going on, and I felt like I was just holding on.
Dr. Guthrie:
I hear you. What about you, Dr. Williams?
Dr. Williams:
I’m good. Life is wonderful.
Dr. Guthrie:
Just had a birthday.
Dr. Williams:
I did just have a birthday, at the time of this. But life is good. I’m good. Life is wonderful. I had a little scare with my father, but that’s settling down. So life is good. I’m very, very happy.
At the last time we got together, we started talking about our origin story, part two. For those who followed us, this is now our fifth season that we’re recording for this podcast. And in our first season, the very first show, we did what we called our origin story, where we talked about how the three of us met in residency and how we all ended up together in this practice.
And we talked a lot about those early years that we were getting to know each other as colleagues, as well as with the early development of the practice. And in the last episode that we did, we kind of did an update of what was going on with our practice from the time that we sold our practice to a management entity. And then we bought ourselves back. And then shortly after we bought ourselves back, our founder, Dr. Rosemarie Schultz, decided to retire.
And so then the running and the owning and the management of our practice was left to us. She left it for us to continue. And so what we want to do today is pick up a little bit more to kind of fill in on some of the things that have happened when we finally realized that we have actually owned and run this practice longer than Rose did when she was here, as she left in the year 2000.
And particularly in the last five years, shortly after we stopped doing obstetrics, there’s just been a lot to happen, least of which is the COVID pandemic and everything that was going on. So there’s been a lot of changing dynamics in the world around us as well as internally with our practice. And I know Dr. Greene, you actually found some show and tell, you have some items that you wanted to go over.
Those of you who are listening to us on your podcast platforms that are audio only, you may want to venture over to find us on YouTube, and then you can get some video to go along with the audio. But Dr. Greene, why don’t you get us started about what’s been going on with our practice in the last, say six, seven years. You got the things about when we celebrated retiring from obstetrics, and maybe start us talking about some of the dynamics that have been changing, as our practice has changed.
Dr. Greene:
Thank you, Dr. Williams. This morning when I was preparing for today’s podcast, you all of a sudden just start thinking back to, “Okay, we’re thinking about where we’ve come from.” And it’s not till you start thinking about the years that you realize how long it has been. So when you say that we actually have been running the practice longer than when Rose was here, in my mind, she was here forever. But things change, people move on, and part of our transition out of obstetrics we celebrated in 2016. And what I came up with was the little book that probably Dr. Williams put together because it has all these wonderful pictures.
Dr. Williams:
I did all the mementos.
Dr. Greene:
And so when I was looking through the pictures, all the pictures that are in it-
Dr. Williams:
And I think Dr. Greene, it does have on there the years, just let them know the years then.
Dr. Greene:
Yes. 1990 when we started obstetrics, and I wasn’t here. And then 2016 when we stopped. And then on the picture is the docs that were in the practice at the time. Well, at this point when we celebrated in 2016, Dr. Schultz wasn’t here.
Dr. Williams:
No, but that was the twins.
Dr. Greene:
Right. And so we have a picture of the twins, babies that we delivered. And just, we have pictures all over the office of babies that we’ve delivered. And that was a big part of our practice. And so us stopping OB in general is a big deal, but stopping OB for all of us at the same time was an even bigger deal. At the time, it was just the four of us. It was myself, Dr. Williams, Dr. Guthrie and Dr. Banks. And so the four women, we just said, “Okay, this is it. We’re not doing this anymore.”
And the celebration we had was more to talk about, “Okay, this is a big change, and change is good, and you’ll be okay no matter what happens.” And I think it was a lesson learned at the time because of the fact that it was kind of scary to say, “Okay, we’re going to put down that part of our practice and just do GYN.” And what are we going to do with all our free time? And some of the comments in one of the books that Dr. Williams has shared with us is, “Oh baby, the places you’ll go.” And it’s an homage to-
Dr. Williams:
Dr. Seuss.
Dr. Greene:
Dr. Seuss. And just talks about the things that babies will do. And it was for us, all the places we’ll go now that we no longer have the babies, and what will we do with our time? And our staff signed little letters and made little notes in the books and just talked about, “What are you going to do? You’re going to fill up your time with what? What are you going to do with this time?” And so for us, it was a way of thinking about our practice in a different way.
How are we going to serve women without delivering their babies? What does that mean for us in the future? And so we’ve talked in a previous episode about the four-day work week, and that was one of the things that we transitioned to a few years after that, that life-work balance was very important to us. Having dropped OB, that now we have time to spend more time with our patients, but we also have more time to spend more time with ourselves and our families.
Dr. Williams:
Exactly.
Dr. Greene:
And so it was, I wouldn’t say an easy transition, but we kind of had the groundwork with, “Okay, this is our big deal in terms of, okay, we could stop OB and just do GYN, and we’re going to be okay. Because we do good medicine. We’re good docs. And the people will come.” And so they have. And the people will come and they will see us four days of the week. And so they have. And looking back in this book this morning, I had to laugh because most of the people that are in our office were not there for this celebration. And so they’ve only seen us post OB.
Dr. Williams:
You mean most of the people who work now.
Dr. Greene:
Where we work now, yeah, they only know us.
Dr. Guthrie:
That’s true.
Dr. Greene:
They only know us post OB. They know the GYN docs, they know the podcast docs. Life now, we talk about the pandemic, and I think people visualize their world to pre COVID and post COVID. And I think we visualize our world into when we did OB and when we didn’t do OB. But now that it has been so long, me personally, I try to remember how did I do it? Because I have a family, I’ve got two boys.
Dr. Guthrie:
Men.
Dr. Greene:
Yeah. And at the time they were young, and I was very busy with them and going places with them. And so for me, all the places you go, were now all the places you go and you’re not on call delivering a baby. And I think that transition in that respect is a scary thing. But we did it. We did it. There were challenges with insurance, there were challenges with just letting our patients know that this is what we do. This is who we are. We’ll take care of you, we’ll help you get pregnant, but we’re not delivering any more babies.
And so I think that it made it easier for other transitions that we’ve had to do in the last five years, just in terms of managing the practice, in terms of realizing that now that we have more work-life balance, realizing that our staff is important for them to have that as well. And when things happen for them, such as when the pandemic struck, people had questions as to, “How are we going to do this? What are we going to be exposed to?” And we were very responsive to recognizing that people didn’t feel safe, and how can we make them feel safe?
And that was more a part of our practice as gynecologists, because that’s an exam that, yes, you come to for every year, but you don’t have to go. You can not go for a while. And it was okay to shut down, but it was a big transition for our staff to say, “Okay, well now what’s next?” And I think becoming that type of owner as well as physician in this type of practice was important to us as the pandemic started, and then coming out of it and recognizing that those life changes for ourselves and life changes for everybody else affected how they worked. And that’s how we kind of look at our practice, so that when things come, we can do it because we do good things.
Dr. Guthrie:
We’ve done it.
Dr. Greene:
And we’ve done it before.
Dr. Williams:
And I think that’s why this time period that we’re in, and Dr. Guthrie’s going to advance the conversation, talking a little bit more about some of the personal challenges and personal growth, but we’re about to approach a very monumental celebration with our practice. Our practice started in January of 1984, is when Dr. Schultz started the practice as a solo practitioner. And at the time she only did gynecology, and did not add obstetrics until later in her career because of the growth of the community.
But at the time that we’re in now, we’re really in kind of a rebranding. And we wanted to take the time to review ourselves, what our history has been, to take the opportunity to celebrate that history, to celebrate our foundation, to celebrate our longevity. And also to make sure that we can assure our patients and assure our staff that we’re not going anywhere. I think that we have a wealth of experience and a wealth of knowledge, not just clinically, not just as it relates to medicine and gynecology, but in being able to navigate, as they say, the vicissitudes of life, the changes that will come.
This practice has been here since 1984, and has withstood a number of changes and challenges that have been external to us as it relates to changes in insurance, managed care. We used to only work at one small community hospital. At one point we worked at three hospitals. We still currently work at two hospitals. So we’ve seen a lot as a business, and as clinicians and as women, and Dr. Guthrie, I think you’re going to help us think a little bit more and look back and celebrate some of the things that we’ve had to face personally with the growth and changes as our lives have changed.
Dr. Guthrie:
So piggybacking off what Dr. Greene was talking about, so one of the first big transitions was going from OBGYN to GYN only. And as I think back on that, it’s almost part of your identity, like you were just, for the first 15, 20 years of my career, that’s what I did. That was my life. Holidays, like you’re saying, your schedule, it just had to fit in with the deliveries. And then we made this big decision. And it was funny because it wasn’t something that I considered up until that point, until we started talking about it. In my mind, I probably-
Dr. Williams:
But you just do what you do.
Dr. Guthrie:
Yeah, because I was just in it, just doing it. And then when we had to make the decision and I thought about it, I was like, “Wow, wait a minute, we’re going to stop.” And then when we did stop, I don’t know for you all, but for me, there was a big transition period because I still felt like I should be doing something.
Dr. Williams:
Something’s missing.
Dr. Guthrie:
Something is missing.
Dr. Williams:
Like you’re forgetting something.
Dr. Guthrie:
I had more time. I could be at home most evenings now, but I still felt kind of nervous, it was like something should be happening. So that was a big transition for me. A lot of the other changes too is that we’ve gotten older, so there are truly seasons in life. And prior to that, I didn’t personally have a family, but Dr. Greene did. So she already was in that phase of taking care of family.
But now the next phase of that is taking care of parents. And so things that you never used to have to worry about, you went on with your day, your life. I mean, you visit with your family, of course you see them and you can, depending on your proximity with them. But now that became a part of my, it becomes a part of your daily routine. Now, if we were still doing OB and that was added to it, I don’t know.
Dr. Williams:
I couldn’t have done it.
Dr. Greene:
No.
Dr. Guthrie:
Well, Dr. Williams, you-
Dr. Williams:
Well, I did.
Dr. Guthrie:
You did, because of your mother. And I don’t know how you did… Talk about Dr. Greene and her family, it was you and it was your mom. How you did that, I just-
Dr. Williams:
You just put your head down and you just do it.
Dr. Guthrie:
You do it.
Dr. Williams:
And we were having a conversation with one of our practice partners, and one of the few men that we allow in our queendom. And he’s always encouraging us to say, “You all can’t quit. You all can’t quit.” And we’re not quitting. But one of the reasons that we really struggled with and then made the decision to stop obstetrics is to preserve our longevity.
Dr. Greene:
Yes.
Dr. Williams:
Because when you’re in the midst of it, when you’re doing it, you don’t realize what a toll it’s taking on you physically, emotionally, even personally. And yes, Dr. Guthrie, you and I are single, but we ain’t dead. And so having the time, the energy, just the capacity to even consider-
Dr. Guthrie:
A relationship.
Dr. Williams:
A relationship. Because it’s just like, when you’re working so much all the time, and we feel that we were very good obstetricians when we delivered babies. To do that, you’ve got to invest in your patients. You’ve got to care about them emotionally. You’ve got to care about them as people, not just as patients, and trying to make sure they have the best outcome possible for their pregnancy. And that takes a lot out of you, decade after decade.
Dr. Guthrie:
It does, it does. And so another transition since we stopped doing OB, or in this season of life, whether or not somebody is still doing OB, is to learn how to take care of yourself. That’s going to be key. You’re now becoming caretakers, a caretaker has to take care of themself or you cannot, you can’t continue. You can’t continue. So that’s another important thing that I’ve realized that that’s important, and to find time for yourself. So I’ve tried to fill our… I’m saying free time, I don’t know, is that what it is? Our less busy schedules with things that I want to do now, where before, and I can only speak for myself, I had this mindset of trying to, not trying to please everybody, but I was making sure everybody else was okay.
Dr. Williams:
You’re putting everybody else first.
Dr. Greene:
Well, you’re a caretaker. That’s what you are.
Dr. Williams:
You’re a caregiver, just in terms of who you are.
Dr. Greene:
That’s what you do.
Dr. Guthrie:
And so I guess the phrase is, try to be a little selfish now, and take care of yourself. Also in this season of life, you’re seeing more life loss. That’s what I’m trying to put it in, instead of just saying death.
Dr. Williams:
But it is, you’re losing people.
Dr. Guthrie:
So you’re starting to lose people now, and you just realize that life is so short, and they’re their expected losses. I just recently lost my aunt who was 92. Of course you’re never ready for it, but that’s expected. But I just had a patient who just lost her husband, but then he got a diagnosis and was dead 10 days later.
But in the age group where like I said, not that you were expecting a loss, but it’s not unheard of. It’s not. But this is another thing that’s hit me. It’s like almost every week, every other week I’m hearing about a friend, a family member, somebody who has had loss. So that’s now a part of my life, is loss. I don’t know how you guys have-
Dr. Greene:
Well, it’s funny, and I don’t know why, especially being physicians, why when we… I guess because it’s just being young. You think you’ve got so much time ahead of you and everybody’s always going to be here, and you get into a different season and you start seeing things differently. Because I think about how I think now and I wonder why I thought how I thought then, because to me that didn’t make any sense. It makes me more sympathetic of younger people because they think that too. But you’re right. And so you do cherish the time you have with the ones you love. And that becomes very important because, as Dr. Guthrie pointed out, life is just short.
Dr. Williams:
Life is short, and life is precious, and it’s just life experiences. We are all hopefully growing and changing and evolving as life changes, as you have different experiences, as you go through different losses, as you go through gains, all those things will start to change your perspective, hopefully for the better. And so all these things I think are feeding into where we are currently professionally, as well as personally. And specifically, Dr. Rebecca Banks, who was a long tenured physician here with the practice.
I believe she came in 1990. She was one of the first physicians that Dr. Schultz added when she started to do obstetrics. And very wisely, Dr. Schultz realized that in order for her to do obstetrics and practice obstetrics in the way that she would want to do it, to do that as a solo practitioner, it just wasn’t going to work well. And so she brought Dr. Banks in, Dr. Rebecca Banks in in 1990 when the obstetrics part of our practice. So the practice’s business model took off.
And so Dr. Banks was here until 2018 when she retired. And so as of 2018 until currently, at the time of this recording, is it 2023? It’s been the three of us. And again, we have gone through a lot of personal changes, gains and losses with family, professionally. We’ve had partners come, we’ve had partners go. We stopped doing obstetrics, which was, as Dr. Guthrie pointed out so well, when you’re an OBGYN physician, it’s who you are. It is your identity. So much so that when we stopped obstetrics, there was this dear… She became a dear part of my life, April the giraffe. And so April the giraffe-
Dr. Greene:
I forgot about April.
Dr. Williams:
April, sweet April, was at Animal Adventures in upstate New York somewhere. And she became viral. April went viral.
Dr. Greene:
Weren’t you watching her.
Dr. Guthrie:
They had a 24-hour feed.
Dr. Williams:
They had a camera. They had a 24-hour feed, because we were on April watch. Because April was getting ready to have her baby, her calf, I think they call little baby giraffes. And I think because looking back on it, that’s the only reason I can explain why.
Dr. Greene:
You watched it.
Dr. Williams:
I became fixated with April. I was up all night with April. It took April 28 hours to have this calf. And thankfully April had this calf on the weekend. But I watched that feed until I was shedding tears of joy.
Dr. Guthrie:
Oh my gosh.
Dr. Williams:
When the little calf baby was born. And the little calf baby stood up and took its first little steps, because if they don’t get up right away, because then I’m all caught up because I’m like, “The baby’s got to get up because the handlers, you can’t go in there and do anything because then if they touch the baby, then April’s not going to nurse the baby, the baby got to get up.” So I’m like, “Come on baby, please, get up on your feet, baby.” So I still have to this day because I ordered from Animal Adventures, a commemorative T-shirt that says I was a member of April’s view crew. Because obstetrics and birth, and the joy of that is who I am. It’s who we are.
Dr. Greene:
Yeah, it is. It is.
Dr. Williams:
We just don’t do it anymore. But it doesn’t take away that part of our identity.
Dr. Guthrie:
I miss the deliveries. I miss being in the room when the life comes in.
Dr. Greene:
Because there’s nothing like it.
Dr. Guthrie:
You cannot explain it.
Dr. Greene:
And it’s funny because people will say, “Do you miss it?” And you’re right. We don’t miss the 28 hours of labor because that does happen even for humans.
Dr. Williams:
Yes.
Dr. Greene:
We do miss that part, because there’s nothing like that. There’s just nothing like seeing the mom excited and the family members excited, and you’re just like, “And I’m a part of this.”
Dr. Guthrie:
Because like Dr. Williams said, they’re tears. They’re all different types of deliveries. There’s one that was so memorable to me, I think it was the couple’s third or fourth, and it was going to be their last. So there’s always the screaming, “Come on, push, push, push, push.” And then the baby comes out and everybody’s like, “Aah.” They just looked at each other and high-fived and went like that, “Did it. We’re done.” And I just stood there looking, I was like, “Huh?” But like you said, there’s nothing like that delivery room, nothing like that delivery room.
Dr. Williams:
And when things go well, and thank goodness 95% of obstetrics, everything goes as it should, but then there’s the other 5 or 6%. And it gets the adrenaline going. That’s when you really go into your superhero mode, right? Because you’re having to manage so many different things at one time because you’re still trying to navigate those complications and those issues. But that can also take a toll.
And so for all of our colleagues who are continuing in obstetrics, we are here and cheer you on and say prayers for you during the wonderful times. And even those times that are more challenging, we know how hard it is in both scenarios, because when you are an obstetrician, it is who you are. It is ingrained in your heart and soul, and you do it because you only want the best outcome for everything involved. So since 2018, it’s been the three of us, and things were cooking pretty good until 2020.
Dr. Greene:
March.
Dr. Williams:
March, to be exact. And then we found ourselves in a different scenario of we had to shut the practice down. Partially we were seeing mainly urgent appointments and or emergencies. So that was a very, again, a stressful time, a scary time for us as well as our staff. As many of you know, there were many businesses who didn’t make it. They were letting people go.
We committed that we were not going to let any of our staff go. We committed to trying to make sure that our staff stayed financially whole in any way that we could. And so we did what we do. We tried to figure it out. But while everyone else was trying to figure it out, during a once in a generation pandemic, it was a lot. And in the middle of all of that, we decided, why don’t we do a podcast? Why not? It seems to be the thing to do.
Dr. Guthrie:
Oh, whatever.
Dr. Williams:
Everybody’s doing podcasts. And as my brother likes to say-
Dr. Guthrie:
That was you Dr. Williams, I will not claim that thought. I will not claim that thought.
Dr. Williams:
As with most things, I get these ideas.
Dr. Greene:
She’s a performer at heart.
Dr. Williams:
I am a performer at heart. But thankfully my partners indulge me, and generally will come along for the ride. So I said, “Let’s just do a podcast.” Because like one of, there’s a rapper that likes to say, “The South got something to say.” So it’s not just East Coast, New York City, West Coast, the south has something to say. So I’m like, “You know what? We got something to say.” At that time, like I said, had been in practice, the business itself launched in 1984. All of us have now been with this practice for over 25 years, 30 years.
We, the three of us have been managing and owning this practice since 2020. I’m sorry, 2000, when Dr. Schultz retired. So I’m like, “We got something to say.” There was a lot going on socially in terms of social justice and racial justice and reproductive justice, and it was just a lot, the CROWN Act. So we decided to launch a podcast in the middle of all that. And I know for me, because I am a performer at heart, and I’m a little bit of a ham.
So it has provided, especially during that time when we didn’t really know what was going to happen, a creative outlet. It also provided a way for us to stay in communication with patients. So we were able to still share a lot of clinical information, health information. And then as things started happening in our world, as we were trying to figure things out, everyone else was trying to figure things out. We talked about that too.
Dr. Greene:
Yeah, we did.
Dr. Williams:
What are some of your remembrances of those, that early time, that first season, maybe the second season?
Dr. Greene:
For me, I think the first season was interesting because it was one visual and then we shut it down and we were on our phones, and because it was the pandemic, we were separated. But that was our connection still, it was our way of it really was a conversation between three docs, three friends, but also with our patients. And I guess I remember we talked about stuff in the world, but we also talked about stuff that we were going through in terms of what we would do when we got home, and the isolation, and what we were looking forward to, and what we missed. I think that was the thing, we were able to kind of express what we were missing, because even when things got back to us seeing patients, there were still some things we just couldn’t do like we used to. And you don’t realize how much you used to do until you can’t do it.
Dr. Williams:
You can’t do it.
Dr. Greene:
Myself and Dr. Williams, well all of us, I guess, we like the movies. And for me, going to the movies became a very family thing. And not having that, it’s like, “Well, what am I going to do now?” The four of us would get together, and even when my elder son went away to school, we’d wait until he was home to see the latest movie. And so going to the movies was a thing that we talked about because it was part of, and how are we going to do that now, and how are we going to gather? We also talked about gathering with people, and Dr. Williams had her, I guess it was her pod rules.
Dr. Guthrie:
Pandemic pod.
Dr. Greene:
Pandemic pod, yes. Who can get in and who can get out, because we were trying to keep ourselves safe, but we’re also trying to keep family members safe, because as Dr. Guthrie mentioned, as we are aging, so are our parents. So we talked about the sandwich generation, which we’re members of. So here we are trying to take care of the parents, so we can’t get them sick, so we got to stay safe.
Dr. Guthrie:
Got to stay safe.
Dr. Williams:
Right.
Dr. Guthrie:
For me, like I said, Dr. Williams, it was Dr. Williams’s idea. I came along for the ride, and I can truly-
Dr. Williams:
She’s done so well.
Dr. Guthrie:
I can truly say that it was a growing experience for me that, I almost, the word wasn’t dread, I was just so stressed-
Dr. Williams:
A lot happened
Dr. Guthrie:
When we would do the podcast. But no, about doing the podcast.
Dr. Williams:
Oh, about doing it.
Dr. Guthrie:
For me, it was just kind of, “Oh, my God, I got to be on there, filming it and we got to talk.” But I can say as the years have gone by, I’m now becoming very comfortable with it. And I’m glad that we do it because-
Dr. Williams:
Now I can really start doing-
Dr. Guthrie:
No. Slowly. And what I think about the podcast is it’s the service to the community. That’s one of the things when we stopped doing OB, because when you’re doing OB, it’s hard to get time to really devote yourself to anything in particular. And so, one of the things that I wanted to do when we stopped OB was to get into more helping the community, doing things like that. In this period of time, for me, I joined a sorority that is known for service. And so that was my way of connecting-
Dr. Williams:
The first and the finest.
Dr. Guthrie:
Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated. But they are known for service. And so I had the opportunity to join the sorority, which I feel has really helped me and helped the community here locally. And then we did this podcast also. So I feel like I am fulfilling that part of the desire that I wanted to do at this stage in my life. So that’s what the podcast means to me. It’s connecting with our patients.
Dr. Williams:
I agree. I mean, I find it so gratifying, and thank you to all you who’ve been listening to us and who follow us, both on YouTube and our podcast platforms. Because we have patients who come up to us all the time, who are like, “Oh, I heard your podcast. And oh, when you said whatever you said, this helped me so much. And when you talked about fibroids, and oh my goodness.” Or they’ve shared their podcasts with either family and friends. And so we’re really thankful for that.
And we don’t take that for granted. And we want to thank all of you, our patients and friends and people we don’t know yet who just log in to see what we have to say at that particular episode. We really value you. We value your time. We understand that everyone’s time is precious. So for you to take time out of your busy schedules to listen to us and or watch us on YouTube, we appreciate that. We don’t take that for granted.
And I agree with you, Dr. Guthrie, I think even for me as a ham, having the podcast as a platform allows us to really break out of our box of so many things that may keep us confined as a profession, as well as women. Sometimes there are things that we have to be so cognizant of that this has allowed us a way to reach out and expand our connection with our local community, and then with the community that goes beyond the patients that we can see every day. So we wanted to take this time with this episode to again, look back.
I think we’ve all heard, and we all know that you can’t really know where you’re going in the future until you know where you’ve been, until you can really understand and honor the great things that may have happened for us over these last 40 years of this practice being in existence. But also the lessons learned. And so I think as we look back over our history, the history of the practice that’s been here since 1984, so we will soon be celebrating the 40th anniversary of this practice.
For those of us who’ve been here 25, 30 years, we’ve been here a large portion of that. And we have lots of things to celebrate. We have a lot of things to be grateful for. We have a lot of wisdom that we have gained collectively through the lessons learned. And we still have something to say. We still have things to do. You’re going to be hearing about some changes that will be happening with the practice, yet again. And whenever, it’s a teaser, I’m not saying yet.
Dr. Guthrie:
There we go again.
Dr. Williams:
Whenever you hear of change, even good change, it’s scary. It can be disconcerting, but to our audience, to ourselves, to our staff, to our patients, we’ve been here, we’ve done that, and we are going to continue doing that.
Dr. Greene:
Yeah, I think that the stuff that we’ve done before really has prepared us and given us those tools, stopping OB, going out of network at the same time with different insurance companies. A global pandemic. A four-day work week. I mean, we could name a number of things that really presented different type challenges that as medical students, who knew?
Dr. Williams:
Who knew?
Dr. Greene:
“I’m just going to deliver babies and take out uteruses. That’s what I’m going to do.” That’s what I was going to do.
Dr. Guthrie:
Pap smears, deliveries and hysterectomies.
Dr. Williams:
Hysterectomies.
Dr. Greene:
That’s it. But I think it is so much more. It’s just so much more. And we have the tools, and we never take anything we’re going to do lightly. We do the research, we think about it, we do the preparation, and we do the impact statement to say, “Okay, how’s this going to affect us? How’s it going to affect other people? And we’re ready.”
Dr. Williams:
Yeah. So please stay tuned. We’re going to just leave it there. So you have to listen to the next episode to see what’s next. For the ladies here, who are on this professional journey with us, we’re very excited about the new changes that are happening. We’re very excited about the plans that we have. We’re very excited about this season of the podcast.
You all have listened to us for the last five years, and we are going to expand, hopefully, what we can offer to you by having guests, perhaps in the studio, but virtually, because we have technology now that allows us to do that, so that we can even expand the amount of clinical information and health information, and just lifestyle information that we can present.
So we’re excited about all of that. So we hope that you will continue to listen to us and stay tuned as we get ready to launch into this next phase of our journey as a medical practice and as professionals working together. So thank you as always for listening. Please continue to check us out wherever you get your podcasts. We have a YouTube channel where you can see us on video. And then of course, we have a lot of information that we share on our website at ptcobgyn.com.
So until we meet again, thank you for your time and your energy, and your support for being on this journey with us, we appreciate it. I’m Dr. Mironda Williams.
Dr. Guthrie:
I’m Dr. Deanna Guthrie.
Dr. Greene:
And I am Dr. Karen Greene. Take good care.