Current Projects
Creating a clinician-reported experience measure of compassion (CREM-C)
Working in healthcare means encountering suffering. Some sources of suffering are avoidable and must be mitigated at the systems level. Some are inherent to caring for the ill and dying, and must be mitigated at the individual, team and systems level. Burnout was endemic in healthcare even before the COVID-19 pandemic; now we are faced with an unprecedented exodus of workers from the American healthcare system. Compassion is recognizing, empathizing, and reacting to alleviate another person’s suffering. This is why compassion is the most salient antidote to clinician distress and suffering. My current research is aimed at creating a tool to measure how clinicians experience compassion in organizations and teams at work. We will deploy this tool across the field of pediatric palliative care and evaluate how this construct of experiencing compassion relates to other clinician outcomes such as burnout, resilience, engagement and turnover, as well as patient experiences and outcomes.
Funding
- 2020 Cambia Health Foundation Sojourns Scholars Leadership Development Award
Creating a journey map for patients with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy
Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) patients deserve high-quality patient and family-centered physical, psychological, emotional, social, and spiritual care to improve their lives at every stage of their illness. Our interactive, web-based Journey Map application will visually educate patients and families about DMD and its treatment path from childhood through adulthood. Once refined, built, and tested, Journey Map will offer an exciting tool to improve care in DMD and other progressive diseases.
Funding
- 2021 Parent Project for Muscular Dystrophy Certified Duchenne Care Center Grant
