 The relationship you develop with the patient is one of the most loving, giving, honest relationships you can have. That person has entrusted you. You've shared the worst and you share the best. I grew up wanting to be a nurse, never wanted to be anything else. I was probably three years out of nursing school and I was working in a cardiac intensive care unit. One of my patients had suffered a large heart attack and I was in her med room, which was open to her nurse's station. And I was laughing and talking with my co-workers and not really paying a lot of attention to what I was drawing up in this range. I went into her room and started injecting the medication and one of the nurses from the desk called out and said, Gwyn, look at your monitor and her blood pressure had just plummeted. I looked down at my syringe and I realized I had double-dosed her on this very powerful blood pressure medication. I was crying and the patient actually took my hand and comforted me and said, honey, everything will be okay. I'm standing there in the back of the room watching my teammates try to salvage a patient that I harmed. I had potentially killed another human being simply because I wasn't paying attention. It was one of the worst nights of my life. I'll never forget it. We were able to stabilize her. It took about four hours. Stay there about six days and then she did go home. I questioned whether I was fit to be a nurse. You know, was I morally fit to take care of other human beings if I could be so careless? So I went into grief counseling. I felt renewed. I felt like, okay, this is my fate to be not only a nurse but a champion for patient safety. We built one of the first quality circles in my unit and we looked at medication administration, how we care for patients, fatigue in nurses. And when a nurse made a mistake, we had a team that would talk with her. We experienced less errors. We developed more processes around checking. We built in redundancy into our systems that we didn't normally have. It took about three years to get all of that set up. She came back to our unit about six months later and she was dying. Her heart was so damaged that it just could not sustain her. And I said, remember we in the hospital before? I'm the nurse that gave you too much medicine. And I said, I want to tell you how sorry I am, but I also want to tell you how much I learned. And she reached up and kind of cupped my hands in hers and said, honey, I told you it was going to be okay. And as long as you learned something, that was great. You know, her name was Shirley. And every time I start a new project, I think about Shirley. She has inspired me for a lot of my 30 years in nursing. I'd like to thank Wen for sharing her story with us today. None of us go into healthcare to harm patients. We choose medicine so we could heal and support those in need. Like other high-risk industries, we need to find solutions that trap these errors before they cause harm to our patients. For the last five months, I have been walking across America to raise awareness of those who have lost their lives due to preventable medical harm, both patients and healthcare workers. I have now walked over 1,300 miles on sidewalks, trails and paths on my way from San Diego, California to Jacksonville, Florida, and have logged in over 3.5 million steps. More than 500 people across the world are also walking and exercising in solidarity with our mission of achieving zero preventable deaths by the year 2030. Together, we have walked a collective total of over 6,000 miles for the equivalent of walking twice around the world to bring awareness to the 200,000 people who die needlessly every year from preventable medical harm. If you'd like to see the real-time view into the miles we've walked together, click on the link below in the description. Dr. Dave Mayer is walking to each Spring Training Park to bring awareness to the Patient Safety Movement Foundation. My wife looked at me and said, you've got to be crazy. Every day that I walk, I walk in memory of a caregiver or patient that's lost their lives due to preventable medical harm. I think people don't realize that healthcare preventable harm is the third leading cause of death in the United States. We need to improve the systems and processes to allow the workers at the front lines to do their job as best as they can. We need your support. The video you just watched, my walk across America to all the Major League Baseball stadiums, will encourage you to join our team and dedicate your steps to raising awareness about this important issue. Thank you. I would like to thank you for inviting me to this very important event when I'm going to talk about mental health and burnout of health personnel. These problems are not unique to healthcare personnel. We are just human beings like all of you who are watching this and we have the same human reaction. The difference is of course that we are caring for life and we know that if we don't go to work, lives are at stake. Our colleagues will have extra workload and so on and we are trained and motivated to save patients. It's also interesting that some of the traits or the properties in human beings that make us more prone to being burnout are the same that attract us to becoming healthcare personnel, like sympathy, like feeling of obligations and the responsibility and so on. But as mentioned, we are just human beings and nobody can go on forever without sleep, rest, food and exercise. But if we try to push our own borders, it can work for a while and then it doesn't work anymore. We try to, with coping strategies, it could be for instance that we have visual thinking, we think that if we just work a little bit more things will become better. It could be that we blame ourselves for not working hard enough, just work harder and so on. And some would even use alcohol and the drugs to get that rest and everybody understands that's not the solution. The symptoms could be emotional fatigue, we feel that small tasks are very, very strenuous now. We could get detached from our work, even cynical and also that even smaller tasks are just so intensely hard to do. If it goes that far, it's really important that you are stopped to move on and move on because if it goes too far, too far, then you will be out of the business for a long time. It takes months to recover and build yourself up from scratch so to speak. And that's why we have an obligation to help each other, support each other, recognize the symptoms and make sure that people get that rest so they can come back sooner and being stronger and better carers for the longer term for their patients. We are normal human beings, react like normal human beings, but we really want to be there for all of you. Thank you. Hello, I'm Robin Simon, the producer and director of Do No Harm. It's a documentary film about the hidden epidemic of physicians' suicide and burnout and the link to medical errors. And it's an honor to participate in the United for Safe Care campaign. In 2014, someone sent me an op-ed piece from the New York Times about these two young doctors who jumped from the roofs of their hospitals within a week of each other. And I come from a family of physicians, so I was shocked. And it set me on a mission to not only find out why this was happening, but why no one was talking about it. And what I discovered was that physicians have a suicide rate almost twice that of the general population and a depression and burnout rate of about 50%. Now these kinds of stats, if this happened in the airline industry, this would be considered a major crisis for air travel. But because of the stigma about mental health and potential financial liability, it's often swept under the rug. This problem even starts in medical training. One physician told me, it's like a time bomb. You have these young medical students who are isolated, they're bullied, experienced sexual harassment in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt so they can't quit. And then on top of that, they're sleep deprived. So I started to wonder, well, if physicians and medical students aren't able to function physically or mentally, what kind of care are we getting as patients? And when I was able to link the high rate of medical errors to physician suicide and depression, it was stunning. I mean, it's said to be over 250,000 preventable deaths due to medical errors. What we need is regulation. And that's why this campaign is so important because it's bringing together policy holders, healthcare workers and patients to push for change. What we need is an independent investigation, independent oversight and legislation that protects healthcare workers that allows them to get the mental healthcare that they need and also reduce the number of medical mistakes. So the film is being used across the country to open a dialogue at medical schools and hospitals about what to do. And talking about it is the first step. If you'd like to get involved, what we need to do is keep the pressure on and make sure it's a priority for this country. Lives depend on it. For more information about the film, you can visit www.dunoharmfilm.com and it's also available on Amazon. Thank you so much. The COVID-19 pandemic was and is challenging in multiple ways. Personally, one of the hardest things was caring for patients in critical conditions while their family members were not allowed inside the ER. It is really hard to imagine the fear these patients must have gone through. I remember a 30-year-old female who was about to be intubated due to respiratory stress and shortly before that she asked me to step outside and talk to her husband. I quickly went outside to look for him and explain to him what was happening. This event really marked me and reminded me that behind every case or patient there are lives, humans, families. I would say that the early scientific uncertainty was probably one of the most difficult obstacles in the pandemic. We as medical professionals are used to acting with some degree of knowledge, especially in this era of evidence-based medicine. But we have to remember that at the beginning we didn't know much. All we knew was that this was almost an exclusive respiratory illness. It was later on that we started to understand about the damaging effects of COVID-19 in the coagulation, cardiovascular and central nervous system. Patients felt frustrated and understandably so about not having any answers as to why this disease was causing multiple problems in their family members loved ones. Our safety is your safety. Right now we live in a continuum where society and the healthcare system are inextricably intertwined. My biggest plea for the public is to share scientifically accurate information. Fake news as you know are rampant, but if we work together we can stop this trend. You can help us tremendously by amplifying the voices of the scientific and medical community. We can definitely help each other. Being a pharmacist today is very different from what has been traditionally thought historically. Our roles are expanding globally and our important role is increasingly being recognized as patients needs have become more chronic. Pharmacists are exceptionally underutilized resources for many patients. We have an abundance of knowledge not only in medications but in disease states, public health issues and the understanding of patients needs as we are the most frequently visited healthcare professionals in their lifetime. Patients can access community pharmacists at local pharmacies but there are many pharmacists who practice outside of the setting including hospitals, drug companies and some pharmacists have their own practices to counsel patients on many different areas including nutrition, lifestyle coaches and many others. It is very frustrating when we have to advocate for our own worth and value to get our points across. We are not recognized as providers in United States federally and this limits us to getting access to tools and resources to help patients appropriately. It is heartbreaking to watch patients suffer with loneliness in the pandemic while at their death bed. Although I myself haven't had a chance to be like a guardian when patients die many nurses and other caring healthcare professionals have literally held their patients hands. I have been privileged to watch these while we attend Codes which is a reviving effort of a team of pharmacists, nurses, doctors and respiratory therapists working together. Suddenly we couldn't really take care of patients the way we would normally do so. It was hard to speak. You're wearing three masks and a welder shield and they're wearing masks and the sound of the high flow oxygen and the ventilation system made it impossible to do all but the most basic of communication. And it's not enough just to give the patient the right treatment, the right oxygen or the right antiviral medications. We also want to be taking care of them and taking care of them is attending to all their needs and being able to talk with them, comfort them, answer their questions, explain the treatments and we realize something we didn't have at our disposal, how limited we are and we can't communicate the way that we want to. And particularly we saw this at end of life care. There were so many patients who died in the hospital, who died without their family, without their loved ones close by, without being able to communicate. And for us, the doctors, the nurses, the nurse aides, the technicians, the respiratory therapists who are with the patients at those moments, all we could do would be to hold their hand at best, talk to them as best we could and hear their final words. It's not the way we'd want to do it. It's not the way we want it for ourselves, for our family or for all of our patients. I think we realize that in the absence of full communication, including touch, including listening and speaking, we really can't give the care we want to give. We can't give the quality care we want to give and we can't give the safe care we want to give. And so of course we're all anxiously awaiting a vaccine so we can go back to giving medical care the way it should be. Being able to attend to the details of observation of communication, of touch, of nonverbal communication to pick up on what's going on with the patient, what's happening medically, what's happening psychologically, what's happening spiritually, to be able to be there in all the dimensions for our patients. What I've seen so far is the fact that in order for the public or us to be engaged in patient safety, it really comes down to the people who are cradling patient safety right now and that would be the healthcare facilities, the healthcare management. They have to really think about opening the door and allowing the patients to come in. One of the facts that is quite evident in patient safety and healthcare is the fact that according to the WHO, we are at about 7.7 billion people in the world and out of those 7.7 billion people in the world, there are only 59 million healthcare workers. That's right 59 million healthcare workers around the world and you can check that up on Google as well. It may have changed but very, very slightly indeed. So when you're looking at 59 million people trying to take care of 7.7 billion people, there is an absolute disconnect there. They can't take care of all of us and we can't expect them to take care of all of us. What's important is to have healthcare facilities and healthcare management open their doors and allow the expertise to come in in non-clinical areas to assist them taking care of the rest of us. Now there's many of us who are constantly being trained and receiving other kinds of training in healthcare but we do bring to the table as well our own expertise in our areas of work. Mine for instance happens to be in communication. I'm sure there are many others who have different experiences as well. I'm currently working with our patients around the world who have experience in safety measures in other industries that can help healthcare as well. So my plea to healthcare professionals is to think about the help that we can give you and it is essential that we are able to do that on a regular and systematic way. So please do open the door because us patients we are wanting to come and help you. So please enable us to be able to do this on a regular and systematic way. Thank you.