Who Gets the Credit?

When I think about peak moments, I remember this guy back in junior high school who decided to try to break the Guinness Book of World Records for skipping rope. I don’t remember his name but the school principal and his teachers all agreed to let him do it during class hours. They marked out a little space for him in our home room. He was at it all day. And he was never alone because there was always a class in the room throughout the day. We didn’t get much work done because we couldn’t keep our eyes off him. It was mesmerizing. The longer he jumped, the more we hoped. We were very careful about how we encouraged him. We didn’t want to distract him and make him miss a jump. And so we watched him with hope in our hearts. It was palpable.  As he neared the goal, we were all crowded around him, teachers and students cheering. He was exhausted and could barely swing the rope over his head and lift his knees. When he made the time mark, we lifted him high above our heads and you could have heard us yelling our fool heads off for miles. Time stood still. He was a hero and we were his adoring fans. It didn’t occur to us to be jealous. His achievement belonged to all of us.

In 2016, an article was published in Psychosomatics, the official journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry (ACLP), which detailed the success of a quality improvement program to co-manage patients with co-morbid medical and psychiatric disorders in the general hospital (Muskin PR, Skomorowsky A, Shah RN. Co-managed Care for Medical Inpatients, C-L vs C/L Psychiatry. Psychosomatics. 2016 May-Jun;57(3):258-63. doi: 10.1016/j.psym.2016.02.001. Epub 2016 Feb 2. PMID: 27039157.). This entailed making a psychiatrist an embedded member of the general medicine team in the hospital who actively comanaged medical patients.

It was so successful that it reduced length-of-stay and lost days to the hospital by a significant margin. It also supported the idea of liaison psychiatry. Dr. Muskin visited the University of Iowa Hospital Department of Psychiatry and gave a Grand Rounds presentation about the project. It also was funded in large part by a philanthropic donation. Who gets the credit? It doesn’t matter because the achievement belonged to all who participated.

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit”-Harry Truman, Kansas Legislature member John Solbach, Ronald Reagan, Charles E. Montague, Benjamin Jowett, a  Jesuit Father, a wise man, Edward T. Cook, Edward Everett Hale, a Jesuit Priest named Father Strickland.

For the full story on the history of this quote, see Quote Investigator.