UCI Health emergency physician highlights similarities in hospitality and healthcare
Emergency medicine requires service industry skills like quick learning, says Dr. Ryan Gibney
IN THE NEWS: Many physicians go the traditional education route, securing undergraduate and medical degrees in their 20s and become practitioners in their early 30s. Dr. Ryan Gibney, emergency medicine physician and the director of the emergency department at UCI Health — Irvine, took a more unconventional route.
He worked at restaurants in his 20s and returned to medical school in his 30s while also balancing family life as a husband and father. He spoke with Healthcare Brew about how hospitality and service industry experience can benefit doctors.
“Service experience can teach doctors a lot about people, anticipating needs, multitasking, and the behaviors that exist in emergency medicine. And medicine, in general, is a service industry.”
He also talked about how he took his own experience working in a bar and how he applied what he learned to working in a hospital.
“Working as a doctor requires a lot of quick learning, skills that come from my background in the service industry.”
Gibney is an instructor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the UC Irvine School of Medicine. He will be the medical director of the emergency room at UCI Health — Irvine when it opens in December.
Discover more about UCI Health — Irvine.
About UCI Health
UCI Health, one of California’s largest academic health systems, is the clinical enterprise of the University of California, Irvine. The 1,317-bed system comprises its main campus UCI Medical Center, its flagship hospital in Orange, Calif., the UCI Health — Irvine medical campus, four hospitals and affiliated physicians of the UCI Health Community Network in Orange and Los Angeles counties and a network of ambulatory care centers across the region. UCI Medical Center provides tertiary and quaternary care and is home to the only Orange County-based National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center, high-risk perinatal/neonatal program and American College of Surgeons-verified Level I adult and Level II pediatric trauma center, gold level 1 geriatric emergency department and regional burn center. Powered by UC Irvine, UCI Health serves 5.6 million people in Orange County, western Riverside County and southeast Los Angeles County. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter).