 down to our last speaker of the afternoon. Ashley Polsky is gonna talk to us about patient initiated verbal sexual harassment. Now before she jumps into this and she finishes and everybody runs out the door. I need to say a couple of thank yous. In absentia, Elaine Peterson, who was our official catherter in terms of residents, faculty and educational efforts. And now Kelly Nelson, who has joined us in the role of official catherter. Welcome. We are glad you are here. And this is, you got off to a really good start with us. I also need to give a big shout out to Ethan Peterson, Megan Johnson. They're the ones who made the physical aspects of this technical aspects fly, connected zoom with what's going on here in person, made people's computers do what they were supposed to do. We're grateful. Who have I forgotten? Well, and I also wanna thank you, looking around the room here in years past, the number of people have dwindled significantly when we get to this point. And I'm saying about the same number of faces here now that I saw here at the beginning of the morning. I'm very impressed. Thanks for being here. Ashley, you're up. Sorry to hold you up. No, you're dead. Somehow I found myself at the end of this session as well. So thank you for not significantly dwindling. No, thank you. So some of you will be a little familiar with this if you attended one or both of the workshops that I held earlier this year, but just as a brief background, a recent study based out of the University of Iowa showed that gender-based discrimination and harassment are highly prevalent amongst US ophthalmology trainees. And unfortunately, patients are the most common source of this harassment. However, very few trainees have received formal guidance or training for how to respond to patient-initiated sexual harassment. To try to bridge that gap, my QI project has focused on integrating a workshop for responding to patient-initiated sexual harassment for both trainees and faculty at the Moran Eye Center with the overall goal of improving participants' preparedness to respond to patient-initiated harassment towards themselves and towards others. To do this, we implemented two sessions of an interactive workshop that was originally developed by the University of Iowa Department of Ophthalmology. And the workshop included interactive discussion and role-play scenarios in order to highlight various communication techniques for responding to harassment, both for physicians who experience harassment themselves and for physicians who observe harassment of others like trainees or colleagues. And this slide just summarizes some of the different communication strategies that were included in the workshop. Participants then completed a survey retrospectively that assessed their pre- and post-workshop preparedness to respond to harassment. And survey responses were analyzed using primarily paired T-tests. So here's a breakdown of the 27 workshop participants, including 12 faculty and 15 trainees. And there was a fairly even split between male and female participants. Prior to the workshop, 74.1% of all participants and 100% of female participants had experienced some form of patient-initiated sexual harassment. And almost 80% of participants had witnessed harassment of a colleague or a trainee. However, only six people, so 22% had actually received formal training to handle sexual harassment from patients. Based on ratings on a five-point Likert scale, we found that after the workshop, participants reported significant improvements in their ability to recognize forms of patient-initiated sexual harassment and to discuss the prevalence and impact of this harassment. They also reported significant improvements in their preparedness to respond to sexual harassment towards themselves or towards trainees after the workshop. So these findings suggest that interactive discussion and rehearsal of communication techniques, like the role-play scenarios, can be really helpful for improving faculty and trainee preparedness to respond to patient-initiated sexual harassment. And although this particular workshop primarily addressed sexual harassment, I just wanna emphasize that similar strategies could be used to address other forms of harassment as well. In the future, we're hoping to incorporate this kind of training more formally into resident and medical student education. We also, and this is one of my goals for next year, we really wanna expand this particular workshop to other groups at the Moran Eye Center, such as our technicians and our surgical staff who are also interfacing with patients on a day-to-day basis. And of course, we always wanna promote open dialogue about this topic so that both trainees and faculty can feel empowered and prepared to call out harassment when it occurs. Here's some of the relevant references. And I really wanna thank Doctors Long, Jacoby and Katz for supporting me in the implementation of this workshop. Thank you to Dr. Katz who kind of had the original idea to do this and approached me. I really appreciate you thinking of me for this. And I just submitted an abstract for the upcoming Women in Ophthalmology Summer Session. So I'll hopefully get to present these findings on a beach in Florida in a couple of months. But thanks for listening.