Can caring for doctors create better patient care?

More than half of U.S. caregivers have experienced “burnout,” a syndrome marked by exhaustion, cynicism and feelings of purposelessness. Photo: Carlos Chavarría Bob Wenz is watching a team of pediatric cardiac surgeons operate. He’s supposed to be leading a tour of the newly expanded Betty Irene Moore Children’s Heart Center in Palo Alto, California—its expanded waiting area, four additional echocardiography labs, naturally lit patient rooms, staff-only garden, and other facilities. But instead of all that, Wenz is stopped outside the door of an operating room, watching a cardiac team enter their second hour of open-heart surgery. Fifteen years ago, Wenz might have been a nurse in that room, hovering over the operating table in five-hour intervals. But today he’s in charge of much more than that, overseeing outpatient cardiology, neurodiagnostics, and interventional services at Stanford Children’s Health and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. It’s hard to know whether Packard Children’s Hospital attracts people like Wenz or they become this way after years of working with children, but simply put, he’s fun. He’s the type of person who wears a tailored suit to work but is in scrubs by noon. The type of person who turns on the new $2 million