The Schwartz Center is committed to supporting healthcare professionals with additional resources on caring for their patients, themselves and their teams during challenging times. Please find mental health and wellness resources here.
Learn about how one of the country’s leading children’s hospitals has prioritized compassionate, collaborative care to enhance the experience of care for patients and families by enriching the experience of care for staff. The journey includes the initial program developed by doctors, for doctors, to optimize connections with patients and families, which then evolved into an institution-wide effort to promote and support a culture of compassion for patients, families and staff. Through a process called facilitated self-discovery, Dr. Baden and his team have worked to promote presence and empathy in all interactions, with a belief that this increases fulfillment and resiliency and thereby mitigates burnout. The process requires genuine commitment from hospital leadership that integrates well with their existing commitments to family-centered care, continuous improvement (Lean), safety (high-reliability) and staff well-being.
In this presentation, Dr. Baden teaches participants how to recognize the value of focusing on staff satisfaction and well-being to promote a culture of compassion in their organization and how to understand the importance of engaging staff through facilitated self-discovery to develop effective and sustainable strategies and solutions.
This presentation presents the results of an independent study (commissioned by the Schwartz Center) of the predictors of compassionate care, including attendance at Schwartz Rounds™.
In each of three sites, an online survey was conducted of all caregivers who were invited to attend Schwartz Rounds, whether they attended or not. The survey included questions about caregivers’ perceptions of success in providing compassionate care, teamwork related to compassionate care, the hospital’s support of compassionate caregiving and demographic information.
During this webinar, Colleen helps participants describe the Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Scale (SCCCS), a tool for measuring compassionate care, the predictors of compassionate healthcare and finally, describe what caregivers need to provide more compassionate healthcare.
This presentation tells an engaging story of discovery, occasional failure and growing success in improving care for patients with advancing serious illness while achieving triple aim improvement. Dr. Shulman and her colleagues’ strategy combines data, education and workflow optimization to dramatically improve advance care planning. In order to take the next step and engage providers, patients and families in difficult conversations, Dr. Shulman and her colleagues teamed up with the Serious Illness Conversation Project to provide a structured tool and coaching for their teams to push their organization closer to providing goal-concordant care for their patients with serious illnesses. Their results are measurable and dramatic, and while they still have a long way to go, they are seeing a change in their practice that goes beyond metrics.
During this webinar, Dr. Schulman allows participants to identify the importance of conversation as part of comprehensive advance care planning and how challenging this can be for providers. She also allows participants to understand the need for a multifaceted approach to education and training of primary care teams and the importance of a team-based approach, with diversity of skills, for advance care planning.
Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT) is a method designed to empower people who work in all areas of care and service. SCT is designed to help people realize a power of unconditional care from within that is deeply healing and sustaining, that makes them more fully present to self and others, and that empowers a strong, active compassion for persons that is not subject to empathy fatigue and burnout. In this webinar, Dr. Lavelle explores methods for cultivating more sustainable care and compassion. She also considers systemic and organizational conditions that impede compassion and explores ways of creating the conditions necessary to support and sustain compassionate care for all.
During this webinar, Dr. Lavelle helps participants understand the importance of receiving care, self care and extending care for avoiding empathy fatigue and burnout, as well as obstacles to compassion and care at the individual and systems level. Dr. Lavelle also allow participants to apply tools for enhancing compassion and care in daily life and in the workplace.
Perhaps the most impactful approach to caring is to first recognize and ask about clues that patients are struggling to take care of their health, and then to adapt care to their particular needs and circumstances. For over a decade, Dr. Weiner’s research team has explored this two-step process, which they term “contextualizing care.”
In the first phase of their research, they trained a team of actors as unannounced standardized patients who would see a physician and indicate that personal struggles were undermining their health care. In the second phase they invited real patients with complex chronic conditions to audio record their visits. Encounters were sorted according to whether the care plan was contextualized, and then patients were followed for up to nine months. When clinicians made the effort to contextualize care, patients had better healthcare outcomes and there was less overuse and misuse of medical services. Remarkably, contextualizing care didn’t lengthen the visit. Dr. Weiner extended the research to include nursing, pharmacists and front desk clerks. During this webinar, he describes evidence that shows that listening, asking purpose-driven questions and adapting care plans to meet patients’ needs really does matter.
During this webinar, Dr. Weiner helps participants to describe the essential role of patient context in planning appropriate care, define “contextualized care” and its antonym “contextual error” and outline the implications for healthcare outcomes and cost of attending to patient context during the medical encounter.
Goals-of-care conversations are filled with emotion. Clinicians can often feel at a road block when they encounter highly emotional conversations. Patients and families may not be able to process medical information or make decisions when they are overwhelmed by emotion. Our presence, support and empathy are powerful sources of strength and comfort. By responding to emotions, we build trust and can move to a place of decision making. During this session, Dr. Aragon will provide a framework for using empathy in a goals-of-care conversation. We will review how to respond to emotion and present examples of how empathic statements can move a goals-of-care conversation forward. Finally, we will discuss scenarios when empathic statements may not facilitate a conversation as expected.
During this webinar, Dr. Aragon reviews the role of empathy when discussing goals of care, explores the use of empathic statements to help facilitate transitions in care and discusses how to modulate our responses when empathic statements are not moving a conversation forward.
Providing care to patients whose cultures and languages are different from our own can be difficult. Patients come with different beliefs, values and styles of communication. Some patients distrust the health care system or health care providers – attitudes which they may assert strongly, or keep hidden. Language barriers add another layer of potential misunderstanding. This webinar presents an overview of cross-cultural issues in health care and the role of empathy and compassion in addressing them. We explore case studies and reflect on effective approaches to providing compassionate, person-centered care to patients of all cultural backgrounds.
During this webinar, Dr. Green allows us to reflect on the role of empathy in cross-cultural care and understand the types of cross-cultural issues that can be a challenge to empathic care. Finally, he describes how we can improve health care providers’ communication and trust-building skills in diverse populations.
Empathy has the potential to be a catalyst for delivering truly individualized quality patient care, generating feelings of meaning in work for providers and for instigating sympathetic distress leading to stress and burnout. This talk navigates through the contemporary research to help us understand the phenomenon of the empathic connection from the fields of psychology (humanistic, social, health and contemplative), neuroscience and medical education in order to consider how, where and when to intervene to support our providers.
During this webinar, Eve helps us to develop a scientific understanding of emotion and burnout and learn about mapping an emotion episode. She also describes emotion regulation strategies and investigates personal motivation and meaning in work.
Patients continually indicate that their ideal clinician is one who listens. At the same time, the complaint that “doctors do not listen” is ubiquitous. This webinar explores this apparent paradox by addressing what listening actually is in clinical settings, its importance and impact and whether listening can be taught and learned.
During this webinar, Dr. Fuks teaches us what listening is in clinical settings and its function in clinical interactions, as well as why listening is the foundation of the clinical method. He also explains the different types of “deafness” found among caregivers and their causes. Finally, he instructs us how to teach clinical listening skills.