VITALtalk

Inflight with the American Cancer Society

We're doing a new gig in collaboration with the American Cancer Society--a series of one-day workshops in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Miami, Boston. (And we're in the air right now!) This is not CME as usual--it's culture change--we attract clinical role models from top cancer centers, equip them with new tools for talking about prognosis, and goals of care, and send them out to be changemakers. And we're drawing on the talents of an extraordinary group of faculty who are teaching with us: Holly Yang (Scripps), Toby Campbell (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Wendy Anderson (University of California San Francisco), Gordon Wood (Northwestern), and Vicki Jackson (Massachusetts General Hospital).

What are we learning? These clinicians are the opposite of resistant--they're eager. They're not burned out--but they're worried about it. They're working in balky systems--and they're holding their own. In our view, they need resilience--and a first step towards that are a set of communication tools that are practical, actionable, and valuable. (In our first workshop, 100% of the clinicians said they would recommend this to a colleague.)

We're always working on two levels--sometimes called 'parallel process'. I've never liked this term--it's always struck me as inside baseball--but the idea is powerful: treat your learners the way you want them to treat patients. So you engage them, activate them, equip them. This is teaching as awakening, feedback as positive change, and metacognition as a pause in everyday practice. I think of these as small acts of courage. I'll add the video player here later, but for now you can watch it here on facebook (& tell me what you think of this experiment).

Hey Miami, how about a little bling?