Michael O'Hara

I am a resident physician in the combined Pediatrics & Anesthesiology residency program here at Stanford. My interest in medicine is in the care of critically ill children and adults, and the multidisciplinary art of resuscitating these patients. My focus specifically is in medical education and developing strategies to better prepare healthcare trainees to handle these stressful clinical encounters. My interest in this topic grew out of my own search to find ways to manage the anxiety I felt during intense situations many years ago. Prior to attending medical school, I worked for years as an advanced EMT, a volunteer firefighter and in the emergency department of a busy trauma center and participated in many situations that proved significantly stressful. Throughout my training in medicine, I’ve increasingly observed the similarities that exist between healthcare and other high-risk industries like firefighting, EMS, and the military and aviation. My hope is to adapt some of these unique training strategies to healthcare training in order to improve the learning and experience for our trainees around the topic of stress and performance.