You are very good at carrying this. That is not the same as being okay.
This is a closed workshop built for attending neonatologists, by a former attending neonatologist. No lecture on sleep hygiene. No one telling you to be more resilient. Two hours with the colleagues who already know what the job actually costs.
11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern | CHOP Main
Attending neonatologists and network physicians only.
Limited to 50 attendees. RSVP required.
The part nobody debriefs
The resuscitation went exactly the way it was supposed to. You still replay it at 2 a.m.
You made the right call on the circuit. You are still not certain it was the right call.
You sat with a family through the worst hour of their lives, walked out, and started the next admission fourteen minutes later.
A parent said something to you once that you have never repeated to anyone.
And somewhere there is a case with your name on it that you think about far more often than you let on.
None of that means something is wrong with you. It means you have been paying close attention for a very long time, in a place where the stakes never come down.
What we will cover
Understanding the types of physician distress. Not all distress is burnout, and treating it as one thing is why most wellness programming fails. You will learn to recognize the distinct patterns physicians carry, including the ones that look like high performance from the outside. Most attendees identify their own within the first twenty minutes and say it is the first time anyone has named it accurately.
Team dynamics and leadership under pressure. Delivery room. Code. Cannulation. The clinical algorithm is not the hard part and it never was. We will work through what happens to communication, hierarchy, and decision-making when the room is loud and the margin is gone, and what you can actually control in those minutes as the person everyone is looking at.
Ethical dilemmas and hard family dynamics. Periviability. Futility. The family that wants everything. The family that has stopped speaking to each other in your unit. We will talk about moral distress by its real name, including what to do with the cases where you did everything correctly and still carry it.
Medical Malpractice Stress Syndrome. There is a recognized clinical picture that follows a claim, and almost no one in medicine is told it exists. We will cover what it looks like, why the isolation makes it worse, and what helps. This section is educational, not legal advice, and no one is asked to discuss their own case.
Building resilience, reducing burnout, and strengthening leadership. You leave with practical tools you can use in the unit this week, not a framework you will forget by Friday. Simple, repeatable things that work in the eleven seconds you actually have.
The experience
This is a working session, not a lecture. You will talk, not just listen, and the room is attending physicians only.
Because your division is hosting, leadership will know who registered. That is where it stops. What is said in the room is not recorded, not summarized, and not reported to anyone. There is no evaluation, no survey with your name on it, and no expectation that you share anything you do not want to share. Passing is always fine.
30 credits, on us
The workshop itself is not CME-accredited. Every attendee, however, receives complimentary access to Stress Response and Emotional Regulation in Neonatal Intensive Care, a 30-credit On Demand CME program developed specifically for neonatologists.
The FIT Collective is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
The FIT Collective designates this enduring material for a maximum of 30.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
Watch it at 3 a.m. between admissions. Watch it on a Sunday. You have six months, and it is yours whether you finish it in a week or a month. Included with your registration at no cost.
About Dr. Ali Novitsky
Ali Novitsky, MD is triple board-certified in pediatrics, neonatology, and obesity medicine, and a Master Certified Coach. She is a former attending neonatologist with CHOP Newborn Care at Chester County Hospital.
Over the last decade she has worked with roughly 3,000 women physicians and delivered more than 200,000 hours of Category 1 CME. She developed DistressRx, a framework for identifying the specific type of distress a physician is carrying rather than labeling everything burnout. She hosts the Metabolism, Muscles, and Mindset podcast and speaks nationally on physician wellbeing and leadership.
She is not here to tell you to do yoga. She is here because she watched what this specialty does to excellent people, including herself, and decided to do something more useful about it.
Reserve My Spot
Two hours. Your colleagues. No agenda beyond this one.
You have spent your career making room for everyone else in the unit. The families. The fellows. The nurses who needed you steady when nothing was. Take two hours and make room for this.
Reserve My SpotQuestions or accommodations: Dr. Dalal Taha, Tahad@chop.edu