This is Chris with the Becker's Healthcare podcast.
I'm thrilled today to be joined by Sushmita
Poffi, MDMPH.
He is chief of the division of primary
care pediatrics
at Stony Brook Medicine
and chief medical program adviser for the Allen
Aldis Center for communicating science and a 10
year professor of pediatrics for the Renaissance School
of Medicine. Doctor Pote, thank you for joining
us today.
Thanks so much for having me.
Doctor, could you please introduce yourself and tell
us a bit about your background?
Sure.
Well, you've already cited all my titles, so
that's terrific.
But my background really is as a health
care executive
with a focus on
workforce development and population health.
And that's,
my fellowship training is in that, in population
health directly.
And I've really been working
throughout my career on how we can make
the system work better for everybody.
Thank you for that, doctor. Could you tell
us let's start with this. What is one
change you've made in the last year where
you had great results?
Yeah. Sure.
So with support from HRSA,
we have a cooperative agreement to promote provider
resiliency, health care workforce resiliency.
And so we've been implementing
a number of programs
to do that.
And that's completely in line with our
strategic plan for Stony Brook Medicine where the
first priority is on
a positive workforce
culture.
So we've been putting together various pieces and
one piece, that I'd like to spend a
little time telling you about is our Alda
Healthcare experience.
And that is a
medical improv communication
workshop for healthcare professionals.
It draws upon the theater arts and the
discipline of science communication
to build healthcare team communication
skills.
And we all know that when a team
feels cohesive, it has positive downstream effects on
lots of different things, including safety,
quality,
and, of course,
organizational
culture, retention,
etcetera.
Doctor, I'm glad you mentioned the improv portion
of that. That's not necessarily something that
our audience would necessarily connect
to health care and building, workforce development.
So can you explain a little bit about
how that has been successful and the feedback
that you've gotten from those who have participated?
Yeah. Sure.
So to be honest, in health care, we
are doing improv every day. Like, whom you
work with in a shift, that changes.
We have new, trainees that join our workforce
on a regular basis,
new hires, all of that.
And we all need to work together in
the moment to take care of the patient
that's in front of us,
even if we don't know each other very
well.
And so improv
is really based on that principle
of
taking what's been given to you and saying
as they say, yes and,
building upon that piece.
And that's one of the first rules of
improv.
And so this healthcare communication
workshop, we've been putting together and piloting and
evaluating
now for the past 5 or 6 years.
And all of our evaluation is showing its
positive impact,
both on communication skills for individuals,
but also amongst
team cohesion,
feeling that
connection to the other folks that you are
working with and thinking about ways that you
can continue to leverage those opportunities for personal
connection
in your day to day work, so that
you're all rowing in the same direction.
That all sounds very much worthwhile, doctor. Thank
you for outlining
where that trend has been working for you.
Speaking of trends, so what are the top
trends you are following in health care at
the moment?
Yeah. So I'm looking a lot at what
is being done in workforce retention, resilience,
those trends, how
technology can be used to really develop
and support our workforce. So everything from virtual
scribes to,
the automated kind of billing pieces that can
be done. All of those things are really
important, I think to support our workforce,
who continue to be stressed
with the high levels of burnout that are
occurring.
So those are the kinds of things that
I've been following.
Of course, the downstream impact health equity is
near and dear to my heart. So I'm
certainly very attuned to what is happening in
that space as well.
Opportunities that come from various organizations, the federal
government,
philanthropic, etcetera,
for, implementing or supporting new programs.
All of those things are things that I
I tend to follow.
Doctor, along the lines of communication as far
as stress is concerned,
have you found that
being able to improve communication skills has helped
reduce stress among teams at Stony Brook and
elsewhere?
We have, and I'm happy to share we
published some about that, and there's more forthcoming.
It's also a good time for me to
mention our single session support center that we
call our S3 center.
And this is a virtual support
that's available to health care workers in acute
need.
There's 2 pieces available for health care providers.
One piece is something they can complete on
their own.
It's a single session web based intervention to
promote a growth mindset,
and it's been proven to help reduce
mild to moderate depression and anxiety.
The other part is a virtual meeting with
a trained person
who can help guide development of a brief
action plan
around whatever the acute need is.
And that we are in the process of
evaluating,
its impact here at Stony Brook Medicine.
Doctor, once you have everyone on your team,
anyone's team, growing in the same direction as
you put it,
hopefully, growth is one of the next steps.
How are you thinking about growth in the
next year or 2?
Absolutely. Growth is definitely one of the next
steps,
and we are thinking about growth in multiple
ways.
As I mentioned, our first priority is our
workforce
culture, our organizational culture.
We want to be a place that people
want to work at and stay working at.
And we are
and we're going to continue to try to
make it as attractive as possible for folks
to stay here at Stony Brook Medicine.
So we're doing lots of different things across
the organization to support that.
We're also a place where we want to
implement innovative ways to deliver health care, so
that people feel that their work is valued,
and that the community is getting that benefit.
So all of those things really are focusing
on workforce as the first step and then
the downstream impact of that in terms of
building opportunities for growth and expansion.
Thank you, doctor. Lastly, I wanted to ask
you, what is one issue or element of
health care do you think deserves a brighter
spotlight?
I think the workforce
issues that we've been talking about deserves a
brighter spotlight. I know there's movements at multiple
levels to do that,
and I think there needs to be more.
Doctor Baldy, thank you for being so generous
with your time and your insights today. We
absolutely cannot wait to share them with our
audience, and we look forward to connecting with
you soon, including at Becker's event.
Thank you so much.