Like so many others, I recently binged The Pitt on HBO Max. I watched ER as a kid (maybe the start of my interest in healthcare and why I work with so many brands in the industry today?) and welcomed the chance to see Noah Wylie on screen as an emergency department doctor again. What I wasn’t prepared for was the hyper-realism of the portrayal of the “day-in-the-life” of emergency room staff—the people on the front lines of care delivery—and the abuse they suffer. In one particularly disturbing scene, a nurse is violently assaulted by an irate patient. As the new med students react with shock and horror to the attack, other staff share some of the injuries they’ve suffered at the hands of patients or their families while on the job. For those on the front lines, the threat of violence is constant and somehow has become just another part of the job.
That’s why it was so important to hear from Ryan Mercer, one of the award-winning content creators behind New York Times video and editorial who joined Mower’s recent webinar, “Under Siege – Confronting Healthcare’s Workplace Violence Epidemic.” Ryan and the team at University of Vermont Health System created a powerful and compelling content series that shared the stories of doctors, nurses, and other care providers who’ve experienced violence at work firsthand. These powerful stories and the way UVM told them create a blueprint for other provider networks, hospitals and healthcare systems to keep this critical subject in the public eye. My takeaways:
Let your people tell the truth. It might be difficult, even painful, to hear the stories from frontline staff. But hearing from those impacted the most, in their own unscripted words, will have the greatest impact.
You don’t have to have the answer. The rise in violence wasn’t caused by a single factor. And no single hospital or system can solve this problem. Don’t let that stop you from speaking out. You don’t have to have the answers, but you do have the opportunity and responsibility to advocate for your staff and patients.
Be afraid and do it anyway. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision the barriers to sharing this kind of message: legal liability, HIPAA, reputational risk, recruitment and retention. It’s appropriate to have a healthy amount of fear in shining the spotlight on an uncomfortable topic. But we can’t let that fear freeze us, stop us from taking the risk to raise awareness and support the staff we all rely on for care delivery. In an era where more and more front line healthcare workers are burning out and it’s increasingly difficult to attract new blood into the profession, it’s critical that this audience feels heard and supported by leadership, even if leadership can’t solve the problem.
We continue to experience unprecedented times in American healthcare, and it doesn’t appear that we’ll experience a return to “normalcy” in the immediate future. As communicators and storytellers, we have to embrace this reality, no matter how uncomfortable that may be. Our people and our patients are counting on us.