Caring Greatly Stryker

John Howard, MD, MPH, JD, LLM, MBA, serves as Director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the Administrator of the World Trade Center Health Program in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C. He first served as Director of NIOSH from 2002 through 2008 and is currently serving his fourth six-year term starting in 2021. Prior to his appointment as Director of NIOSH, Dr. Howard served as Chief of the Division of Occupational Safety and Health in the California Department of Industrial Relations, Labor and Workforce Development Agency, from 1991 through 2002. Dr. Howard is board certified in internal medicine and occupational medicine. He is admitted to the practice of medicine and law in the State of California and in the District of Columbia. He is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court bar. 

 

Stefanie Simmons, MD, FACEP, is the Chief Medical Officer at the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation and a board-certified emergency medicine physician and healthcare executive. Dr. Simmons served as the Vice President of clinician engagement for Envision Physician Services for more than seven years, serving more than 26,000 physicians and advance practice providers with a focus on professional wellbeing, including translational research and programs designed to bring wellbeing best practices to clinical environments. She served as lead clinical faculty for the Clinician Experience Project Wellbeing program.

 

In this episode of Caring Greatly, Drs. Howard and Simmons share insights about the creation of the Impact Wellbeing Guide. The Guide, which is free, provides concrete, evidence-informed steps leaders can take to carry out the broader recommendations from the U.S. Surgeon General and National Academy of Medicine. They discuss insights from the process of creating and testing the Guide across multiple hospitals in the CommonSpirit Health System. And they offer guidance to leaders who are just getting started on their professional wellbeing journey.

 

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Stryker.

Educated at the University of Kansas School of Medicine and trained at the Medical University of South Carolina and the Harvard fellowship in Palliative Care Education and Practice, Jennifer K. Clark, MD, has been in the world of healthcare for more than 20 years. With Med-Peds training and board certification in the subspecialty of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, Dr. Clark is a physician and healthcare delivery consultant serving in various roles as a clinician educator, administrator and innovator at the local, national and international levels. When not serving in her volunteer role at Clarehouse, Tulsa Oklahoma’s home for the dying, Dr. Clark teaches at The University of Tulsa and collaborates with various organizations dedicated to fostering innovative approaches to human flourishing. Recently, she began the process of authoring a book on the power of suffering. 

 

In this episode of Caring Greatly, Dr. Clark shares insights from research she recently published on leadership loneliness in partnership with the Institute for Healthcare Excellence. She delves into the ways that leader loneliness creates a self-reinforcing cycle in which isolation leads to self-devaluation, attempts to compensate through more work and less sleep, which then further compromises connection. As a result, says Dr. Clark, they become less effective and resilient as leaders, decreasing the efficacy of their teams and lowering organizational resilience. Like burnout in clinicians, leader loneliness results from structural elements that can be addressed through deliberate connection and positive organizational design.

 

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Stryker.

In this episode of Caring Greatly, Dr. Geiger talks about the need to support nurses holistically through an approach that Ingenovis calls ACT, which stands for Advocacy, Career, and Tools. Based on interdisciplinary research, Dr. Geiger and her team built the approach as a means of combatting burnout and building resilience at both the structural and individual levels. By advocating for what nurses and other clinicians need at the policy level, supporting their career advancement, and providing tools and resources that teach individual wellbeing, Dr. Geiger hopes to bolster the nursing field and keep more nurses working in roles that offer professional fulfillment and personal wellbeing.

 

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Vocera, part of Stryker.

In this episode of Caring Greatly, Mr. Forti shares the science of autonomic downregulation as a focal point for individual wellbeing. While he is an advocate for system change, he believes that those in the healing profession also have a moral obligation to care for their personal wellbeing, given the critical nature of the work they do and the proven links between wellbeing and patient care outcomes. At Hospital for Special Surgery, Mr. Forti created a program that teaches the science behind autonomic downregulation as well as simple practices such as sleep, breathwork, alcohol-abstention, gratitude and nutrition that support heart-rate variability (HRV), a key measure of wellbeing. To date, more than 700 clinicians have completed the training.

 

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Vocera, now part of Stryker.

In this episode of Caring Greatly, Dr. Sexton talks about his team’s focus on providing accessible, evidence-based wellbeing practice to healthcare team members across the country. His five-part training covers gratitude, work-life balance, self-compassion, awe and wonder, and group-level wellbeing. The approach mixes didactic learning on the science behind wellbeing practices as well as time to put the concepts into practice. Dr. Sexton believes that evidence-based, individually-focused wellbeing practices are an essential complement to broader efforts to transform system factors that cause burnout and distress.

In this episode, Dr. Harry and I talk about the principles of cognitive load theory and how they apply to the practice of medicine. We discuss individual, team, and systems approaches to managing and minimizing cognitive load by removing extraneous load from system processes and technologies. We talk about the need to bring human factors engineering science and principles into healthcare so that leaders can work with the cognitive capacities of team members, and free up their finite resources for the most human-centered tasks and relationships. Finally, Dr. Harry shares insights into how leaders at every level can contribute to team member and patient safety by prioritizing an understanding of cognitive capacity and designing accordingly.

Dr. Liz Harry is a leader who cares greatly.