From left to right, Gold Foundation Chief Operating Officer Elizabeth Cleek, PsyD with panelists Steven Forti, Chief Wellness and Resiliency Officer, Hospital for Special Surgery; Helen Arteaga Landaverde, MPH, Chief Executive Officer, NYC Health + Hospitals/ Elmhurst; and Dr. Christopher Lehrach, MD, MBA, Chief Physician Executive, Nuvance Health.
The Healthcare Burnout Symposium on June 23-24 featured critical topics on clinician well-being and several Gold Foundation-connected leaders, including Gold Foundation Chief Operating Officer Elizabeth Cleek, PsyD, who led a panel titled “View from the C-Suite: How Senior Leaders are Promoting Clinician Wellbeing and Professional Fulfillment.”
The panelists included Helen Arteaga Landaverde, MPH, Chief Executive Officer, NYC Health + Hospitals/ Elmhurst; Steven Forti, Chief Wellness and Resiliency Officer, Hospital for Special Surgery; and Dr. Christopher Lehrach, MD, MBA, Chief Physician Executive, Nuvance Health.
The symposium, which was held at the New York Academy of Medicine in New York City, highlighted the factors that contribute to burnout and discussed how healthcare leaders and front-line workers can help their organizations address these critical issues.
In the “View from the C-Suite” session, each of the panelists spoke eloquently about burnout’s terrible and long-ranging impact on healthcare team members and strategies that could facilitate transformative change.
Several of the panelists pointed out that while addressing burnout aligns with fiscal savings, their core motivation is a commitment to the clinicians who are a part of their community and who see so many patients every day.
For these senior leaders, caring for their colleagues’ well-being drives them to do this important work.
The panelists at the session titled “View from the C-Suite: How Senior Leaders are Promoting Clinician Wellbeing and Professional Fulfillment.”
“Clinician well-being is an urgent topic for the Gold Foundation and all of us who are passionate about humanistic care for all,” said Dr. Cleek. “Each of the senior leaders brought deep insights to the challenges we face in changing the future for the better – for both clinicians and patients.”
Many other members of the Gold Foundation community also presented at the Healthcare Burnout Symposium, including conference co-chair, Dr. Paul DeChant, a clinician burnout expert who formerly served as a member representative for Watson Health on the Gold Corporate Council; Dr. Susan Frampton, President of Planetree International; Dr. Jonathan Ripp, a Gold grantee; and Dr. Cynda Hylton Rushton, a Gold grantee and nursing leader who co-presented a Gold Human InSight Webinar on building resilience through meaningful recognition.
U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, who is also the 2020 Vilcek-Gold Award for Humanism in Healthcare recipient, gave welcoming remarks on the first day. Healthcare worker well-being is one of the current priorities of the Surgeon General, who released an advisory on the crisis earlier this year.
“We entered into the healthcare profession to heal and to serve,” Dr. Murthy said. “We are asking for a system where we are allowed to do so.”
