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Issue # 9 | December 2014
In This Issue
On the Set: Palliative
Care Filming
Faculty Education
Fellowship Applications Now Open
Filming for Advancing
Relational Learning
Worldwide
Dear Reader,
We have had many exciting developments occur in the
Institute community in the past month and would love to
share those with you all.
On the Set: Palliative Care Filming
PERCS-Radiology in
South Africa
PERCS-NICU Rounds
during Nightshifts
Nurse.com publishes
story on TEDx Talk
Difficult Conversations
in Healthcare: Teaching
and Practice
IPEP Spotlight: Lewis
Wheeler
IPEP Spotlight: Melissa
Heywood
Why Do Doctors Commit
Suicide?
The Ripple Effect:
Consider the Impact
Our Mission
To promote relational
learning for health care
professionals that
integrates patient and
family perspectives,
From left: David Casavant, MD, Brigid O'Connor,
Phil Thompson, Shari Nethersole, MD, Richard
Goldstein, MD, Peter Frumkin, Eric Stange, and
Elaine Meyer, PhD, RN
On November 14th, IPEP filmed the Palliative Care and Endof-Life modules at BCH - Waltham. Led by Dr. David
Casavant, the filming was the culmination of a year-long
collaborative effort across IPEP, the Pediatric Advanced Care
Team, the Division of Critical Care Medicine, and the
Children's Hospital Primary Care Center (CHPCC).
Filmmakers Peter Frumkin and Eric Stange along with their
team from Spy Pond Productions will produce the film.
The Palliative Care and End-of-Life modules included four
scenes depicting the Martin family's series of conversations
with the pediatric care provider. Brigid O'Connor, IPEP's
Performing Arts Consultant portrays the mother, and other
professionalism, and the
everyday ethics of clinical
practice.
PERCS This Month
Workshops
12/10 - Bearing Bad
News and Bearing
Witness in Neurology
12/11 - Cardiovascular
and Critical Care:
Children with Special
Healthcare Needs
longtime IPEP actors, Phil Thompson, Matt Wood, and
Amanda Collins, represent the father, patient, and daughter.
Shari Nethersole volunteered to be filmed as the primary
care pediatrician, Richard Goldstein provided the palliative
care expertise and guidance, and Elaine Meyer served as the
IPEP consultant. The photograph above shows the team
huddling as they reviewed the case scenario and coached
the actors. Stay tuned for the premiere!
Faculty Education Fellowship Applications Now Open
Rounds
12/17 - Navigating the
Challenges of Everyday
Practice
Topic: "Promoting
REDZONE Etiquette:
Communicating with
Families"
Fellows Drs. Robert Geggel, Renee Brant, Daniel Kamin,
Sara Forman, and Sarah Pitts, with Dr. William Branch,
Jr., Visiting Professor for the Fellowship.
12/18 - NICU
Topic: "Holiday Moods:
Joy, Sadness, and
Everything in
Between"
Grant Update
IPEP Faculty Associate
David Urion, MD, along
with Claudio DeGusmao,
MD, Donna Luff, PhD, and
Elaine Meyer, PhD, RN,
received IRB approval
to go forward with their
project entitled "Assessing
the Impact of an ActorBased Curriculum for
Enhancing Communication
and Relational Skills in
Child Neurology and
Neurodevelopmental
Disabilities Residents: a
pilot study funded by the
American Academy of
We are pleased to announce that applications are currently
available for the second cohort of fellows for the Faculty
Education Fellowship in Medical Humanism and
Professionalism. The Fellowship provides an opportunity for
faculty to enhance teaching effectiveness and role modeling
in humanism and professionalism, and to serve as positive
influences on the institutional culture.
Boston Children's Hospital is part of a national ten-site
project, partially funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation,
which is designing and implementing curricula in humanism
and professionalism for faculty. This project aims to create
a critical mass of faculty members committed to humanistic
values who will promote more humanistic teaching and
learning environments at their institutions. Children's is
unique in that they have developed an institution-wide
faculty fellowship and adapted the curricula for pediatric
and adolescent medicine faculty.
The Fellowship began in 2013, and ten outstanding Faculty
Education Fellows from across a number of Children's
Neurology.
Actor's Corner
Amanda Collins
Appears as 'Nurse Patricia'
in a 4-hour HBO miniseries, Olive Kitteridge.
Lewis D. Wheeler
Will be appearing at New
Rep Theatre in Watertown
in Muckrakers
(Jan 10 - Feb 1, 2015)
Becca A. Lewis
Will be appearing in the
play Broken that she
helped develop at
Boston University.
(Dec 6-7, 9-10, 2015)
Family Faculty Update
Ellen Waddill and son
Timothy Steven attended a
Palliative Care Education
and Practice program
(PCEP) session offered by
the Center for Palliative
Care at HMS.
"Timmy and I had a
wonderful time with the
group of professionals we
were teamed up with. I
talked about the struggle I
had in making a referral to
the Pediatric Advanced
Care Team (PACT) at
Boston Children's Hospital.
A few years ago Tim was
having a particularly
challenging stretch; PACT
was brought up 3 times
before I actually asked for
the referral. Tim is doing
great now and I am
thankful for the
departments and divisions participated in the first cohort.
The Faculty Education Fellowship is sponsored by IPEP;
co-sponsors include the Office of Faculty Development, The
Academy at Children's, and the Office of Graduate Medical
Education. Elizabeth A. Rider, MSW, MD, IPEP's Director of
Academic Programs, directs the Fellowship. The 2015
Fellowship will begin in February with application deadline
on January 16. For additional information and to apply,
please see the Fellowship Announcement here and
Fellowship webpage here.
Filming for Advancing Relational
Learning
Worldwide
Working with
OpenPediatrics
filmmakers Brandon
Moye and Karen
Gerofsky, the Advancing
Relational Learning
Worldwide Disclosure
and Apology Curriculum
began filming on December 2nd with two outstanding
speakers. We were honored to film Dr. Bob Wachter, a
Professor and Associate Chairman of the Department of
Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who
is widely considered the academic leader of the hospitalist
movement. He is also a national leader in the fields of
patient safety and healthcare quality, and authored the
highly influential 2004 book on medical errors, Internal
Bleeding: The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic
of Medical Mistakes. For the past six months, Dr. Wachter
has been in Boston for a sabbatical at the Harvard School
of Public Health and working on his forthcoming book The
Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of
Medicine's Computer Age. To find out more about Dr.
Wachter's career and interests, please visit his blog.
We were also thrilled to welcome Dr. Andy Carson-Stevens
as a visitor to the Institute (pictured above at IPEP's
Overland Street offices with Donna Luff). Dr. CarsonStevens is a Clinical Lecturer in Health Care Improvement
at the Institute of Primary Care and Public Health, Cardiff
University, United Kingdom. He is also part of the Safer
Primary Care program team at the World Health
Organization (WHO) Patient Safety. Dr. Carson-Stevens
relationships, the thought
provoking conversations
and the decisions we
made as members of the
team."
Articles of Interest
The International Charter
for Human Values in
Healthcare: An
interprofessional global
collaboration to enhance
values and
communication in
healthcare
E Rider et al.
Expectation
Management
JP Chretien
Family Presence During
Resuscitation and
Invasive Procedures in
Pediatric Critical Care: A
Systematic Review
S Smith McAlvin &
A Carew-Lyons
Practicing Narrative
Medicine
S Mullangi
Doctors Tell All - and It's
Bad
M O'Rourke
'Touching' on Something
Bigger
H Riess
5 Small Ways to Show
Compassion
R Weber et al.
leads a national study to characterize primary care patient
safety incidents reported to the National Reporting and
Learning System in England and Wales. Donna Luff serves
on the External Advisory Board for this study and is working
with Dr. Carson-Stevens on joint publications from the
research. Dr. Carson-Stevens is no stranger to Boston or to
online learning - he interned with the Institute for Healthcare
Improvement (IHI) and, in 2012, IHI appointed him as the
UK and Ireland Faculty Lead of their Open School. He now
oversees over 50 communities of educators and students
across the five nations. Dr. Carson-Stevens contributed a
film for Advancing Relational Learning Worldwide on the
changing culture around Disclosure and Apology in the UK.
As our curriculum will be accessed worldwide, we are
delighted to have this international perspective.
PERCS-Radiology in
South Africa
Stephen Brown, MD, Director
of PERCS - Radiology and
IPEP Faculty Associate, led
a webinar for the Radiological
Society of South Africa on
November 26th. The RSSA
has a strong interest in ethics and communication. The one
hour webinar was available to radiologists across South
Africa who watched from their home computers. The lecture
entitled "Training Radiologists to Talk to Patients and
Families" covered background and rationale for
communication training and presented the PERCS
workshop model and efficacy data. This webinar represents
PERCS debut in the continent of Africa!
PERCS-NICU Rounds during Nightshifts
PERCS-NICU Rounds are a dynamic and educational
support program offered to staff to enhance communication
among caregivers with families focusing on real time
issues. With utmost support of nursing director, Cheryl
Toole, MS, RN, CCRN, NEA-BC, we are excited to offer
PERCS-NICU Rounds to night staff. The NICU has a large
number of staff who work exclusively at night often leaving
them feeling disconnected from educational opportunities.
Nightshift PERCS-NICU Rounds will help to close this gap
and encourage valuable sharing of experiences while
providing support with issues that may be unique to the
nightshifts. The Rounds will begin December 11th and be
offered monthly. These meetings will be facilitated by
Thorsten Langer, MD, a German pediatrician who has been
Quick Links
IPEP Website
Contact Us
Workshop Information
Workshop Registration
Where We'll Be
working with IPEP as co-facilitator and researcher since
2013, and Deborah White, BSN, RN, CCRN, a NICU
charge nurse and Staff Nurse II. Deb's many years of
experience as a bedside neonatal nurse, her personal
attributes as a compassionate active listener, and
background as a retreat facilitator make her perfect to colead this initiative. PERCS-NICU Rounds is an open forum
and all staff are welcome to attend. We hope this is the first
step to bridging education and communication between day
and night clinical staff teams.
Nurse.com publishes story on TEDx
Talk: On Being Present, Not Perfect
Elaine C. Meyer, PhD, RN was recently interviewed for a
feature story that appeared in Nurse.com, which is part of
the Gannett Healthcare Group (USA Today). Her
TEDxLongwood Talk has now received nearly 8,000 hits.
Most recently, Elaine has written a Facilitator's Guide to
accompany the Talk, which has been adopted in several
nursing and medical schools across the country. If you have
not yet watched the TEDxLongwood Talk, please take a
few moments to view it on YouTube by following the link
below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phUUjk_btiY.
Difficult Conversations in Healthcare:
Teaching
and Practice
Difficult Conversations in
Healthcare: Teaching &
Practice is a one-day
interprofessional faculty
development course that offers
the opportunity to learn about
innovative approaches for
teaching and enhancing relational capacities,
communication skills and professionalism. Participants will
experience and learn about a variety of educational
strategies including: the Program to Enhance Relational
and Communication Skills (PERCS) model, use of
narratives, values exploration, appreciative inquiry, small
group team-based learning, videotape/discussion,
interactive didactic, large group discussion, and facilitated
reflections. The course draws a national and international
audience and is offered 3 times in 2015: Saturday, April 11;
Saturday, May 16; and Saturday, June 6. CME/CEU Credits
are offered for physicians, psychologists, social workers,
and nurses. Early registration is recommended as the
course often sells out. For more information, please click
here. To register for the course, please click here.
IPEP Spotlight: Lewis Wheeler
IPEP actor Lewis D.
Wheeler, who has been
involved with IPEP since
2006, received NREMT
certification this summer as
an EMT. After taking a fourmonth course at Mass Bay
Community College, he
passed his practical and
cognitive exams to receive
his two-year NREMT certification as an EMT-B. His interest
in pursuing EMT training arose from several areas of his
life, including his work at IPEP, "During the past decade my
parents went through lots of medical issues. As their only
son, I was their main advocate and support. My dad passed
away in 2012, and my mom is now struggling with midstage Alzheimer's. During all of this, I've been heavily
involved with many IPEP programs. I found I had a real
interest in the medical side of illness as well as the
compassionate and empathic side, so I decided to pursue
EMT training and take it to the next level." IPEP helped to
defray some of the costs of taking the course by purchasing
Lewis' textbooks, "Which was incredibly generous - those
huge books are expensive!" Lewis now plans to find parttime EMT work in order to supplement his acting and
theatre work, "My next step is to find work and get more
experience in the field, to see how I deal with the real-world
stress of the job, and see where it takes me from there."
IPEP Spotlight: Melissa
Heywood
In October we had another successful
visit with Melissa Heywood, the
PERCS coordinator at Royal
Children's Hospital, Melbourne,
Australia and winner of the Dame
Elisabeth Murdoch Nursing
Development Scholarship. Melissa
immersed herself in the PERCS
pedagogy. During her time here she
attended PERCS Rounds,
the Pedagogy and Practicalities Seminar, and a PERCSRadiology workshop. The visit additionally provided the
opportunity to work closely with Dr. Elaine Meyer and her
team who generously shared their expertise and wellestablished educational and research frameworks. As part
of her site visit, Melissa also attended the BCH Fall Forum
for the Nursing Science Fellowship to continue her work on
the cross cultural research project that RCH and IPEP will
be undertaking. Melissa has since returned home to put all
her learning into action, with two PERCS workshops that
were scheduled for November. Melissa has also been
recently accepted in a Master's program for the upcoming
academic year!
Why Do Doctors Commit Suicide?
After co-facilitating a PERCS-Radiology workshop medical
error enactment, Dr. Robert Lebowitz,
IPEP Faculty Associate was prompted to
share the New York Times article "Why Do
Doctors Commit Suicide?" by Pranay
Sinha. A first year resident physician in the
department of internal medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital, Sinha emphasizes
that a medical culture that promotes
openness and communication about the
stresses of the job would be well received
by medical staff. This he believes would
increase connection among colleagues and
reassure them they are not alone. It is important for doctors
to apologize to affected patients or patients' families when
mistakes are made, such as an important error in diagnosis
or treatment. It is equally important to recognize that errors
can have devastating consequences for doctors as
well. Sinha states, "It could also make it easier for residents
who are at risk to ask for help. And I believe it would make
us all better doctors." This is especially true for those
doctors still in training who need reassurance and support.
The Ripple Effect: Consider the Impact
The Ripple Effect: Consider the
Impact is a free resource provided
by Melbourne City Mission
whose motto is changing lives every
day. The book chronicles patient
and family stories and recollections
when first learning about their
diagnoses. It is designed to assist
health professionals when facing
challenging tasks of conveying
difficult news of a diagnosis to
individuals and their caregivers. To
access the book, please click here or email
[email protected].
We thank each of you for your enthusiasm, efforts and
contributions to the Institute. As we know, "none of us is as
smart as all of us" and we are pleased that you are a part of
the Institute community. Please let Donnah (Dee) Gallett
know if you have any special news or accomplishments that
you would like to share.
Best, Elaine
Elaine C. Meyer, Ph.D., R.N.
Director, Institute for Professionalism & Ethical Practice
Boston Children's Hospital
Associate Professor of Psychology
Harvard Medical School