Dr. Sara Bolton

Sara M. Bolton, MD specializes in consulting to healthcare organizations and providing training, coaching, and psychiatric care for physicians. She teaches physicians how to successfully negotiate complex and ever-changing work environments, how to refine management and leadership skills, and how to map out meaningful career trajectories. Her focus is on helping physicians stay aligned with their core values while developing skills and conceptual models for lifelong career success. She coaches individuals in how to recover from burn out, to expand resiliency skills, and to enhance their well-being through lifestyle medicine interventions. Dr. Bolton receives regular referrals from academic institutions, former coaching clients, colleagues, the Physician Health Service, and healthcare attorneys.

Dr. Bolton spent nine years as Medical Director of the Clinical Evaluation Center at McLean Hospital. In that role she had extensive supervisory, teaching, and leadership responsibilities. She participated in the MGH/McLean residency selection committee and taught medical students, residents, nurse practitioners, NP students, PA students, and attendings. Dr. Bolton spearheaded numerous quality improvement projects and Partners-wide initiatives. She interfaced with healthcare facilities throughout the state.

Dr. Bolton was a consultant at the Levinson Institute for over twenty years. She consulted, taught, and coached managers and leaders from Fortune 500 companies and companies in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, manufacturing, utility, healthcare, & government sectors. She was the Assessment Director for the Physician Health Service of Massachusetts where she worked with referred physicians from all specialties to help them return to optimal levels of functioning.

Dr. Bolton became co-director of the weeklong Harvard Medical School CME course entitled, “Management and Leadership for Physician Executives,” having been a faculty member in that course for over twenty years. She has taught executive MBA students from China and Singapore as part of the the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CME Program.  She led workshops under the auspices of the Simmons College School of Management Speakers Bureau as part of Navigant Consulting’s Second Annual Women in Business Leadership Forum in Yountville, CA. 

Dr. Bolton harnesses her academic major in Conflict Analysis and Conflict Resolution at Williams College, her medical training at Harvard Medical School and her adult psychiatry residency training at McLean Hospital to inform her work. Dr. Bolton is an Academic Graduate in Psychoanalysis of The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute’s five-year program and received fellowship training in neuropsychiatry at McLean Hospital.  She was elected President of the McLean Hospital Staff Associates for three years in a row. She was an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Associate Psychiatrist at McLean Hospital.