Interdisciplinary care for patients is key, but did anyone ever walk you through best practices in working with colleagues from different specialties?
Robert Sawyer, MD, a professor at the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker College of Medicine, in Kalamazoo, sat down with Infectious Disease Special Edition to give tips to healthcare professionals. Dr. Sawyer discussed the varying points of view of not only surgeons, but also medical infectious disease specialists and pharmacists, in goals of improving patient care. The conversation is based on the talk he gave at MAD-ID 2025, in Orlando, Florida.
This transcript was made using artificial intelligence.
00:08
Meaghan Lee Callaghan: Hi. I'm Meg Callaghan with Infectious Disease Special Edition. And I got the chance to be in person [at] MAD-ID 2025 and see your talk about the relationship between the surgeon and the ID doc. And I thought it was really cool, so I want to talk about it more with you.
00:26
Sawyer: Fantastic. Well, thank you very much. I love the opportunity to talk about it. It's a really important topic for those who are surgeons and people are interested in infectious diseases, and people like me who are a little of both.
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00:37
Callaghan: So could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself?
00:40
Sawyer: Absolutely. So I'm Rob Sawyer. I'm at Western Michigan University Homer Stryker School of Medicine, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. My clinical background is in general surgery and critical care, surgical critical care, trauma, and so forth and so on. But, throughout my career, I've always been very interested in infectious diseases.
That's where my research has almost always been. And therefore my great interactions with both our medical infectious disease colleagues, but also our pharmacist and PharmDs who are very dedicated to infectious diseases, is also an area [that] I've just had a great time working with people.
01:23
Callaghan: Why do you think it's important to talk about the relationship?
01:26
Sawyer: Yeah. No, a fantastic question. If you take a moment, if you actually just take a moment and think about it, antibiotics are really, really important. And I'm going to talk a little bit about antibiotic stewardship and the appropriate use of antibiotics to try to prevent resistance.
But, of all the patients, for example, in hospitals, the surgical patients probably are exposed to antibiotics more frequently because not only do we take care of patients with infections, but almost all of the patients who get operated on in a hospital end up getting antibiotics prophylactically before they get an operation to make sure they don't get an infection or try to prevent infection, and therefore, the people who use antibiotics, surgeons are very high up on the list of most commonly doing that.
And whenever you have a group that uses antibiotics a lot, input and interactions with nonsurgeons who are interested in infectious diseases—again, pharmacists and medical ID people—is really, really important to make sure that we're doing the right things. We're doing things in line with what they think, you know, [is] the most important way to use, you know, these really important drugs, and therefore stewardship interaction relationships are all very, very important.
02:48
Callaghan: What do you think the ID doc needs to know about the relationship that could maybe benefit the workspace? And then what do you think the surgeon should know?
02:59
Sawyer: The expertise is overlapping, right, if you think about it. So, for the nonsurgeons, you know, generally expertise in antibiotics, specific antibiotics, bacteria et cetera, et cetera, other organisms. Surgeons tend to be experts in, obviously, surgery.
But what can be done from [a] technical surgical standpoint to, say, treat an infection. Right. So for the surgeons, when we're talking to our nonsurgical colleagues, a lot of time the discussion and what we would want them to know is related to, okay, we either think we can do something as a surgeon or someone doing an intervention to help with this situation.
It could be draining an abscess, could be removing, say, infected skin or something like that. That's really, really important. The other thing to always keep in mind is, at least in most institutions, infectious disease experts are consultants, whereas surgeons are normally the primary caretaker of these patients. And as surgeons, like any other caretaker of a person, if you're dedicated to working on that one patient, you were always most concerned about that one patient.
And trying to do exactly what's right for that one patient. And sometimes that makes us a little more, say, aggressive in things like giving antibiotics and so forth. So kind of an appreciation of the, I'm going to say, a little bit of anxiety surgeons may have when they're taking care of a patient. They've had who has had an operation, and maybe it looks like they have an infection. [We] will tend to be a little more again, aggressive about using antibiotics.