SONSIEL_Casey Moffit (Brittany Drumm & Dawn Snyder): this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Hiyam Nadel:
Welcome to the SONSIEL podcast, where we host interviews with the most transformational nurse scientists, innovators, entrepreneurs, and leaders. Through sharing their personal journeys, we create inspiration, provide guidance, and give you actionable ideas you can use to be a catalyst for change.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
Good morning, Dawn and Brittany, and thank you for joining us for the SONSIEL podcast. We’re really excited to hear your story and share with many others. Why don’t we get started by doing some introductions? So I’m Mary Lou Ackerman, I’m vice president of SE Health. I focus on innovation and digital health, I have a nursing background, and I’m also a SONSIEL founding member and one of the board members, so really pleased to have you joining us today. And I’ll turn it over to you, Brittany, to tell us a little bit about yourself, your background.
Brittany Drumm:
Great. Thank you so much. So my name is Brittany Drumm. I’m the Program Director of Professionalism and Well-Being here at Geisinger. I’m a former administrative fellow and former opera singer. So I think one of the neat perspectives I get to bring to the table is both, that kind of business mind and some creative background, so I really grew up in this health system here at Geisinger with a huge passion for wanting to figure out the right ways to take care of our employees. My sister-in-law will probably kill me for saying this, she’s an ICU nurse here, she’s a big inspiration to me, and wanting to be on the front lines of doing things that make her life and her work here easier has been an inspiration for my career. So I am thrilled to be doing this work and thrilled to get to kind of implement this program alongside Dawn.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
Awesome, and Dawn introduce yourself.
Dawn Snyder:
So I’m Dawn Snyder. I’m a nurse, I’ve been at Geisinger fourty-some years. I’ve been having the pleasure of being in various roles with the majority of my career has been in oncology and palliative medicine, and most recently I joined Department and Center for Well-Being as what we call a navigator. And so I have the true joy and pleasure of getting out amongst the staff and talking with them, seeing how they’re coping, and getting them help that they need. So we are so excited to be starting this new program because this is what the nurses have been telling us that they need.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
… I love that, I love both of your backgrounds and longevity in an organization, really lets us, you know, we bring all that history, I’ve been at SE Health for 36 years and, you know, bring that history forward, always learning from the past and then pushing us in forward directions as well, recognizing what some of those challenges are, which constantly change, and then what are all those opportunities. So let’s jump into your program and tell us all about that.
Brittany Drumm:
Sure, I’ll start. Dawn, I would love your feedback as we go. So Dawn represents a team within our team of navigators that, as she mentioned, gets out and really rounds and checks on our staff. So they’ve been doing that since the middle of the pandemic, I would say late 2020, early 2021, and in the midst of that, what we’ve asked them to do is really gather feedback, real qualitative stories, understanding of what is the experience of the front line. And we have kind of pulled the quantitative and qualitative elements of that data together, and when we looked at the opportunity to apply for NurseHack4Health, we thought this is a great way for us to synthesize this data that we’ve been collecting and look at it as a representation of what do our front line employees, specifically our front line nurses, tell us that they need? And when we looked at that data, we got some real clear pictures, as I’m sure is not a surprise, the number one thing that kind of emerged was staffing challenges. And we know that there are so many different teams, so many different organizations working hard on that problem, even within our organization. So we said, okay, within the Center for Well-Being, what do we have the unique capability to impact? And the second, third, and fourth things that we saw come up were really kind of related in the sense of grief, stress, and moral injury, right? That ongoing, how do I cope with the things I’m seeing every day? How do I cope with the impacts on my family? And so we said this is a place where we can focus, let some of the other experts focus on those staffing challenges, and let’s kind of bring some support to what’s happening day to day. So we met with our innovations team and decided to kind of start pulling through those qualitative pictures to say, what do we hear from our employees from that feedback that they would love to have? And we have a pretty active pet therapy program that rounds on our patients, and so during the pandemic, our employees got a lot of sideline joy from seeing those pets kind of come onto the floors. And I think Dawn has recounted several times that there’s at least 1 or 2 units in our main hospital that actually has kind of a wall of stars of the dogs that kind of come out and grown on the patients. So when we started thinking about what we could do to make an impact, we thought about this pet therapy scale, but with an additional, how do we use pet therapy as a tool, as an entry mechanism, to also allow us to insert some peer support, insert some mental health support? How do we deliver those two in tandem so that we use that opportunity to make sure that the people who need those comforting moments also get resources so when they leave that kind of initial dopamine-loving dog moment, they know what to do from the struggling perspective? Kind of where the concept of our plan came about and knowing that we had the infrastructure in place with a strong peer support network and our volunteer services pet therapy team, we thought this is something that we could probably scale pretty quickly with a little bit of assistance. So.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
Wow.
Brittany Drumm:
… Dawn?
Dawn Snyder:
No, I think you said it quite well.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
I love that, and it’s almost like walking the talk, like we put these things in for our patients and we see that, we see the incredible impact, but don’t often think about how that can also be expanded and support staff, and love the way you talked about it almost being a bit of a gateway into then, having other discussions with them. Wonderful, great thinking. And the idea of the navigator role, you hear that in healthcare all the time, but it is the patient navigator, not really the staff navigator. So that’s really brilliant that you’ve, you know, it’s really building on the assets you already have and how can we expand that usage. So what inspired you, you know, thinking way back now to work in healthcare space?
Brittany Drumm:
I’ll start with you on that one. I think my answer is a little interesting, but I would love to hear your journey to healthcare.
Dawn Snyder:
Sure. Well, I’ve been very blessed, certainly in my nursing career, but I’ll be quite honest with you, when I started out, 47 years ago, there weren’t very many careers for women at the time. You know, nursing and teaching were careers that were socially acceptable, although I always gravitated towards being a caregiver even before I became a nurse. So I think it was a natural, but having said that, after I got into the career, I really found that I enjoyed being with the patients directly with them and in that capacity. So I became a clinical nurse specialist and just really enjoying that space. But it’s, so blessed by so many nurses throughout my career who have taught me very valuable lessons and having had the opportunity to work with some of the people who provide the pet therapy, and so it’s just been very fulfilling and very fulfilling from here.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
Awesome. Brittany.
Brittany Drumm:
So my background in healthcare is interesting. Like I mentioned earlier, my formal original training was in opera and I did that for ten years post-undergrad and loved so much of that world, and yet there was this sense of connection, meaningful time spent with people that I really missed a lot of the time, right, spending so much time traveling. And so when I got married to my wonderful husband in 2015, we moved together here where he was already living, working at Geisinger, and I had never experienced healthcare before as an industry. So I took a job pretty quickly as a patient access representative working on our front line about 15 years into my professional life of management and kind of understanding different industries to really have to pay the bills while being an opera singer. And I was really struck in my onboarding of Geisinger that the conversation really became about if you see a patient in the hallway and that patient is trying to figure out where they’re going, they’re looking confused, it is your job in that moment to stop what you’re doing and take that patient where they need to be. It’s not your job to be the front desk person, to be the food service person, it’s your job to help the patient. And that was the first industry that I had been involved in that really told the story in that way. And so I was so enthralled with this experience quickly of, wow, this is really a hands on opportunity to help other humans, and I think it filled a need that I’d been looking for in opera. So as my career progressed and I ended up getting my master’s of business administration while working here, Geisinger supported me through the ability to grow my career in that way, I quickly figured out that though we do a great job, I’ll say this not Geisinger, but really in healthcare, of caring for our patients, sometimes we miss the mark on caring for our employees and our people the same way, and I know cognitively we always want to. We know that the people are the people, and we’re here to take care of all of them, but sometimes we miss the mark on actually executing that. So when I entered into administrative fellowship, I’ve always been kind of a nontraditional candidate in that my career goals never pointed towards clinical operations as much as they pointed towards human operations. How do we do the same thing for our employees that we want to do for our patients? How do we make sure that those two experiences of care and real compassion are the same? So I’ve had enormous opportunity to continue to focus on that place, and as much as the pandemic was really challenging for me here, it gave me a real opportunity to be deployed to this work full-time. So my role became about scaling our peer support network in 2020 for the first time as an organization and I continue to grow in this space since then, and I’m so grateful I have.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
Yeah, as much as the challenges that we faced during the pandemic, it certainly brought to light the opportunities for change within the healthcare system, doing things differently, doing them better. And your focus on the comfort piece of it, because that certainly was, as much as the hard work and long hours and what people saw and what people had to deal with during that time, hopefully, we never face anything like that again in our healthcare system, but the fallout of that is quite a bit of emotional injury with staff and all of our front line workers and stuff like that. So great space and you know, some things, you know, timing is just right, and it sounds like that’s almost a little bit of what you’ve all experienced as well, which is great.
Dawn Snyder:
Here one other little thing. As Brittany was talking, what made me think about it. So I mentioned to you that I had taken care of patients in palliative care and oncology, and so that was a very comforting care kind of situation, but I actually retired from nursing. Then when the pandemic hit, as you said, it was a prime time to, they called me and said, would you be willing to come back and help our staff pretty much the way you help the patients? And so you’re absolutely right about the timing, this is the perfect time for this program to take place because as Brittany said, we don’t care for our staff as well as we care for our patients for the most part. So thank you again for giving us this opportunity to do that.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
Yeah, yeah. No, it’s a great story to share and I’m humbled to be a part of this conversation. Actually, I love what you’ve done and where you’re taking this. When did you first recognize that you had that sort of innovation bug? That you’re an innovator? This is really quite a story.
Brittany Drumm:
Well, I think in my time at Geisinger, I have figured out that all of the background that I have in different industries has allowed me to synthesize different perspectives, different customers and how to create experiences that kind of span different industries. And so I think my background being not directly from healthcare has really given me due and given me credit to kind of step into a space of innovation. I also think for me personally, innovation in a business and sort of design in this healthcare space sense really feels akin to the magic that happens when you get to create a new production. Somebody’s giving you parameters, somebody is giving you staging, but it’s really up to you to kind of create a world that immerses people. And so I think that same natural skill set to create magic that I’ve had to be trained in, in a very different space, makes me really interested in doing that differently here, my personal perspective.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
Dawn, what is your innovation bug?
Dawn Snyder:
Well, really, it’s the voice of the nurses and that’s where I get my joy, is going out talking with them and asking them. And that’s what we would specifically ask them, knowing that they were having a really challenging day. What would bring you some joy into your job? What’s the hardest thing about what you do? What makes you feel happy at home? And we would hear the same thing again and again and again, you know, had to bring joy. So I like to take the credit for it, but I can’t. It’s actually from their voices, and I’m just so honored that I get to be a voice.
Brittany Drumm:
Well, the mouthpiece for those people. As I’ve done for a quick shout out to you, we have an incredible innovations team at Geisinger, and our design thinking team worked with us deeply in the brainstorming session that we had really pulling apart and pushing us and questioning us, and as part of the brainstorming process, we created a persona, right, in that data to say, what are we really hearing? And we created the persona of Rebecca and started brainstorming, not around, how do we solve this sort of big challenge for our nurses, but how do we make Rebecca’s day better? And I think just having our innovations team kind of push us towards thinking about that a little bit differently really helped us create a solution that was both manageable and really impactful.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
Right, well, they do say nursing is an art and a science, so it’s an interesting collaboration you have with your background in opera and the arts, and the business and the science, and the arts from nursing. It’s no surprise really that you’ve come up with some really creative solutions. What was sort of the biggest challenge that you faced as you moved forward?
Brittany Drumm:
So far, I would say the biggest challenge that we faced is wanting to scale both of the, I would say, the two components of this, the peer support network and the pet therapy program, as we would like to. Our goals were pretty aggressive, we wanted to grow our peer support network by an additional 150 peers, and we wanted to grow our pet therapy program by an additional 50 pets and handlers. And so I would say just the recruitment and maintenance of trying to scale those things very quickly has been the biggest challenge, but I think we’ve had some really incredible partnership from our volunteer services team, from our marketing team, from our finance group. So everybody that’s really stacked hands to say, yes, this is meaningful. And our nursing division has been such a champion in saying, what do we need to do to help you get this off the ground? I think they were, our nursing leadership as we were going through this innovation process was a final gut gateway for us where we said, this is what we think, this is what we’re hearing, but we need your buy-in to know, do you think this is the right solution for us to take forward in this process? And they sort of undoubtedly said, yes, we think this will really make an impact. And so they’ve been real champions for helping us get this out of the ground, too. So I think there’s been a few challenges, but I will knock on wood and say so far, aside from trying to scale a lot quickly, we’ve been very fortunate to have such good partnership that we can do this right?
Mary Lou Ackerman:
Yeah, that’s great, good. How has SONSIEL helped you in your journey?
Brittany Drumm:
So I’ll say the opportunity to participate in NurseHack4Health was severalfold. For us to have a catalyst for innovation, for us to have the opportunity to really even the pitch session where we got to hear some of the incredible innovations that other systems were doing, really challenged us to think outside of the box, not just in this space, but in all of our programming to say, where can we incorporate some of the brilliant work that’s being done out there into here as well? And so the opportunity for exposure to all of the brilliant innovations I would say has been such a huge gift to us, and the financial element of being awarded this grant money to be able to scale this has been really helpful. We knew that one of the things we wanted to do as part of this was to engage our community, and we live in a rural area where sometimes there are financial constraints in people wanting to contribute, to give back to our hospital. So being able to offer scholarships to our community who want to train their dogs to become pet therapy dogs gives us the opportunity to then re-engage our community in a way that’s meaningful for them. That has been a huge gift that’s come out of this, from my perspective.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
It’s nice that you’re making an impact even outside of the walls of the organization, which is nice.
Brittany Drumm:
Yeah, I think we have the luxury of living in an area where our community and our members and our patients and our employees are really all the same, right? So we don’t live in a major metropolitan area where we might be seeing different people than we work with. And we see people, we talk a lot about the Geisinger family, and in a lot of ways that’s true because the people who work here legitimately are often our family members, and the patients who come in here can’t tell you how often it’s a challenge for us because so many of the nurses know the patients that come in. And so there’s that added layer sometimes of moral injury that happens when you have to step yourself out of caring for a person you know?
Mary Lou Ackerman:
Right.
Brittany Drumm:
So it is an opportunity to engage the community in a way that I think is unique to central Pennsylvania or these kind of rural health systems, because our community is our family as we are.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
Dawn, maybe I could ask you this question. I’d like to say we’re coming out of the pandemic, with my fingers crossed that we continue in this journey, but what do you see for nurses in the next few years?
Dawn Snyder:
Well, it’s certainly a very challenging time because we have had nursing shortage because of the pandemic. A lot of nurses have quit, many nurses have quit and gone into other careers or had retired earlier than they anticipated, but I think there’s a lot of optimism as well. As I get out there and I talk with the nurses, there are some brilliant minds out there and some compassionate nurses who want to do what’s best for their patients. And, you know, they’re being encouraged to look at other models of care, given the fact that we don’t have as many nurses as we did before, given all the complexities that are surrounding our patients that we didn’t have before. So they’re being challenged in many different ways, but I can honestly say that they are rising to that challenge. But again, if we can do anything to make, when they do have those challenging days, a little bit easier, then if we help our staff, then they can be better for their patients and that’s the ultimate goal. So yeah, there are a lot of challenges out there, but I think the nurses are up to it, I really do.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
Yeah, I think the time as we talk about timing, this is the time for nurses to pull together, use that brilliance, as you mentioned, and build on their foundation of just the type of people they are, they really do care, and they’re compassionate. And how do we help them drive forward more innovation, whether that be in those models of care, whether that be in repetitive processes that maybe could be done in another way, you know, with some digital technology, those sorts of things. So there really is, a bit of the mission of SONSIEL is to really help amplify the voice of the nurse, make sure if they’ve got ideas, somebody is listening, and how can we help them bring those ideas forward and to real life because they are the ones who have the answers.
Brittany Drumm:
They sure are. I’m so grateful for that mission. I would add, with all of this, as you kind of talked, alluded to, a little bit about how are we doing sort of documentation and workflow in a way that’s the most meaningful. I think if we, in our role, in your role, as a society can contribute anything to the compassion of those nurses. It’s creating systems in which they can flourish. And so as much as we’ve got these programs that we are thrilled to be able to bring to the front line, we know that’s one small piece of the puzzle of really doing this right. So we want to be the people that are advocating for the change in their documentation needs and really making sure that they get to work in the way that is the most fulfilling and top of license and not just right from an efficiency perspective for the hospital, though, that is so critical, but also the right place for them to thrive. So we can do that and allow them to get back to being the compassionate, strong, innovative, incredible minds that they are. We will be doing the best service we can.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
Absolutely. I know we’re just about at time, maybe a couple minutes over, but what would be the one thing that you want to leave with the listeners today here, one tidbit of great advice?
Brittany Drumm:
Tidbit of great advice, I would say, for listeners that are nurses, I would say thank you, so, so deeply. If working in healthcare has taught me anything, it’s that nurses are largely underappreciated in how incredible they can be, and they are, in providing so much change, so much love, so much compassion to human beings. I think too, if you are a nurse, thank you so much. If you are in the public, thank a nurse, whomever you are, I think we’re grateful. I’m grateful to be able to do anything to support the brilliant minds, and I’ll pass that to you.
Dawn Snyder:
Yes, you basically said it all. I’m very proud to be a nurse because of the people that I see that I work with every day and the care that they provide in the most difficult of circumstances. And they truly are the heroes, and, you know, in the beginning of the pandemic, they were seen that way. And then as things changed a little bit, things got a little bit more challenging, and the public changed their opinions a little bit. And I don’t quite understand why all that is happening, but in the world that we live, things are happening, so sometimes they don’t feel valued. So if you are another nurse out there with them, know that they are valued for what they do and who they are and what they bring, and the uniqueness that they bring to each and every life that they touch.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
Yeah, couldn’t say that better. Well, I think the work that both of you are doing is reflective of the way you and your organization values nurses to really look at their comfort and address their needs and listen to them and help bring these solutions forward. So on behalf of SONSIEL, but more so on behalf of all the nurses, thank you for helping to make their lives and their lived experiences as nurses better. We really appreciate that.
Dawn Snyder:
Thank you.
Brittany Drumm:
Thank you. Thank you for the mission of SONSIEL and the work you’re doing as well.
Dawn Snyder:
Absolutely. Great.
Mary Lou Ackerman:
All right, enjoy the rest of your day. Really appreciate chatting with both of you.
Brittany Drumm:
All right, bye bye.
Hiyam Nadel:
Thanks for tuning in to the SONSIEL podcast. If today’s podcast inspired you, we invite you to join our tribe or support our mission by visiting us at SONSIEL.org. That’s S O N S I E L.org.
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