Dear Susan Cieri

Dear Susan Cieri

Dear Susan Cieri,

I am very pleased and honored to write this letter in support of Dr. Matt Russell’s nomination for the Department of Medicine Quality Improvement Award.

You know about Matt’s project, “Optimizing an Interdisciplinary Family Meeting in the ICU Setting.” In supporting Matt’s nomination, I would like to attest to the success of this project.

At Matt’s invitation, I attended the first meeting about the project in April 2012. At the time, I had been a staff chaplain at BostonMedicalCenter less than a year. I had attended a number of family meetings in the ICU setting, but I could not say I felt satisfied with the process or outcome of many of the meetings I attended. However, as the proverbial “new kid on the block,” I also struggled to know how I could play a role in improving the family meetings or changing the culture I found already in place.

So I jumped at Matt’s invitation to that first meeting. This means I have been involved in Matt’s project from the beginning, and my enthusiasm for it has not waned. To date, I do not think I have missed one scheduled meeting. It goes without saying that Matt has brought passion, vision, energy and commitment to the project. He is quite driven—I mean this in the most positive sense—and I found his enthusiasm infectious. Because Matt was at the same time joyful, hopeful and realistic, it was easy for me to want to attend meetings with Matt about this project, and it was easy for me to stay involved and committed to it. Consistently, the possibilities for this project to make improvements in the quality of care of patients at BostonMedicalCenter have been real and concrete to me. I trusted Matt’s conscientiousness—as well as his spiritual grounding in caring for the patients and families who find themselves at BostonMedicalCenter.

A central feature of the project was to invite—among others—ICU bedside nurses, physicians, social workers and chaplains to a family meeting simulation training. I was the chaplain in several of these trainings. These trainings provided an opportunity for me to talk with my ICU colleagues about what ittruly means to be interdisciplinary, and to discuss the value of the interdisciplinary approach when it comes to care of patients and their families especially in the ICU setting. Most importantly, however, we got to practice what we knew in our heads and take it to heart.

For me, the primary success of Matt’s project lies in how it has empowered those of us who were fortunate enough to attend the trainings. Changing the culture of any institution takes time, so I will not say that all the family meetings I have attended since the implementation of Matt’s project have left me feeling satisfied. However, what Matt’s project has done is to create a community of ICU staff at BostonMedicalCenter who can begin and sustain an ongoing conversation about how to improve interdisciplinary communication in family meetings. Where I could not see before how I could initiate such a conversation, I now find in ICUs colleagues who have either attended the trainings or have heard by word of mouth about Matt’s project and “gotten the bug.”

I would like to close this letter with another comment that is again more about Matt than the project. The fundamental thesis underlying the project is that hospital patients and their families are best served when teams providing care are truly interdisciplinary, when all members of the team feel included, when the contributions and knowledge each team member brings to the table counts. Certainly, Matt’s leadership was central to the project’s development and success, but in the course of making the project come to fruition, I found it quite refreshing that Matt did not just “talk the talk” about teamwork and interdisciplinary collaboration. It was important to me that Matt also modeled—throughout the planning and development of the project—what he envisioned for family meetings in the ICU setting. So in my collaboration with Matt, “better” and “best” are not just theoretical possibilities: I can say I have seen and have experienced both.

Thank you for this opportunity to offer these words in support of Matt Russell’s nomination.

Samuel Lowe, M.Div., Ph.D.

StaffChaplain

BostonMedicalCenter