Laudio Blog

LeAnn Thieman, speaker, author, and founder of SelfCare for Healthcare discusses the importance of caring for oneself; body, mind, spirit, and time.

Over the course of the past few weeks, our health system clients have been working with us to navigate the changes that the COVID-19 pandemic has created.  In particular, we’ve seen ICUs in hospitals across the country taking the lion’s share of the COVID cases. 

Cynda Rushton, an international leader in nursing ethics and a member of the Grace team at Johns Hopkins, shares how to use the elements of grace to create the conditions for compassion during stressful and uncertain times. These elements of grace are an anchor and a resource that can be used in the midst of complexity and chaos.

Last week I published the first in a series of blogs focused on nursing in the midst of a crisis and why it is truly a team sport. I also highlighted that the value of our role and the job we do remains the same, both during and in the absence of crisis. This week I would like to share some of my learnings from my experience. 

One of the core use cases of the Laudio platform is measuring indicators of burnout and helping frontline managers react to those indicators in real-time. Over the course of the past few months, I’ve been keeping an eye on many burnout indicators and tracking how hospitals have been proactively managing them.

I am a nurse. My clinical background includes six years as a bedside nurse in a medical intensive care unit at a huge, magnet-designated, academic medical center.  It was the highest level of care you can imagine ­- every therapy from ECMO to solid organ transplant, cutting-edge immunotherapies, really complex, high-risk surgeries. We handled all kinds of atypical illness presentations where a patient needs to be evaluated by providers that have “seen it all.”

During times of crisis, change, and uncertainty, it is commonplace to look to others for direction, security, and re-enforcement of self-worth.  Yet, within each of us, lies the ability to generate these positive feelings of “selfness”.

Leadership though, is all about change right? So we should be good at it, right? Probably not to the degree of change that is needed now. We need a new paradigm that creates new ways of thinking. I call this Phoenix Leadership.

I’ve had the opportunity to speak with more than a dozen Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) from large and small health systems across the country. And, one thing I heard repeatedly during each conversation was that the healthcare industry is at an inflection point and those systems that adapt quickly and create new sustainable structures and norms will survive and thrive post-COVID.