Urologist discusses Women’s Urologic Health Alliance, parental leave

Kari Bailey, MD

In this interview, Kari Bailey, MD, discusses LUGPA’s Women’s Urologic Health Alliance and the importance of parental leave policies in urology practices. Bailey is a urologist and the head of the women’s health department at AAUrology in Annapolis, Maryland.

Could you share some goals for the LUGPA 2024 breakout session “Women’s Urologic Health Alliance Program Adapting to the Modern Workforce”?

The Women's Urologic Health Alliance is something that we have created over the last few years to try to focus on the changing landscape of urology, mainly with women being increased in number in the field. But not only that, there's a definite shift in the workforce, with women definitely, but also generationally. There's a new generation. There are actually about 5 generations at any point in the workforce, and the ability to interact with these different generations that have different ideals and priorities than possibly some of the previous generations [is important]. We're going to talk about some communication styles and differences in leadership styles and ways in which you can focus on hiring and retaining these newer practitioners that may have a bit of a different skew on what they're interested in.

Women are pushing into higher numbers in urology. It used to be, you could find a woman here and there, and now you're going to see 30%, 50% of residency programs being women and joining in the workforce. It's already happening, but we're seeing it less in private practice than we are in academic medicine, because women are more likely to go into academic medicine for a plethora of reasons. That's why it's really important for us as LUGPA to educate and adapt so that we can have more women physicians in our groups, so we can further the advancements.

You touched on the need to recruit and retain more female urologists. Could you expand on that topic?

Another one of the goals for the Women's Urologic Health Alliance session is to talk about parental leave. I think these are not in place in a lot of practices. It is something that this generation, both men and women, not only are going to be happy to see, they're going to expect it. So we really need to make sure that when we are trying to recruit people, that we have these policies in place that make sense to their priorities and to the changing landscape. Women are more likely to join academic centers for a number of reasons, as I mentioned, one of them being that they have more comprehensive policies. They can tell you what's going to happen if you decide to have a child and what kind of support you're going to get, whereas a lot of these private practices are behind in that, and women are just sure what they're going to get and what kind of support they're going to have. So I think that's really important. I think work-life balance is very different than it was 20 years ago, probably even 10 years ago, in terms of what the lifestyle of a physician looks like, what the expectation of the lifestyle of a physician looks like. Things that were typically used to recruit younger physicians need to change because those aren't their priorities anymore. The biggest challenge will be adapting to figuring out what people need, and what's going to retain them, and what is important to them, and it's not necessarily what was important to the leadership 20 years ago.