Speakers and Reactors:

Dr. Charles Denham – Moderator
Lacey Hart, M.B.A., D.D. h.c.
Rick Warren
Jennifer Dingman

 

Dr. Charles Denham:  Good day. I’m Dr. Charles Dedham. I’m chairman of TMIT Global, and one of the co-founders of the Med Tac Bystander Rescue Care Program. I’ll be both a speaker and your moderator today. We’re so very blessed you’re joining us to learn how to keep your family safe. Second,  our topic today is faith-based covid leadership. What do we learn to serve others from multiple faiths?  We’ll cover support of loved ones in the hospital, best practices in long covid care, dealing with grief during the pandemic, delivering safe, good Samaritan care, and loving our friends and family,  through division.  When we interview various folks,  who are leading organizations from multiple phases, here are a few quotes: 1)  it feels like we’re building a bridge to nowhere; 2) The changes are happening so rapidly. 3) As soon as we put something together,  it’s old and it causes confusion; 4) whatever position I take, I make someone mad;  and, 4) Why do anything if it’s going away? And 5)  the last one is,  why do,   and we, but we’ve got that there double because that was,  that was,  frequently an issue that would pop up, especially with the evangelical,  groups.  So the bridge to No Nowhere, , image for those of you that are on the webinar and those that that are on the podcast, is the,  chola Tia Bridge in Honduras. It was a long bridge,  that was built in a region notorious for storms. Any of you who have taken,  courses in geography know that,  our waterways can migrate. And,  the waterway with all of the storms and the damage did, did migrate, and the bridge became entirely useless. So,  it’s a good metaphor for those who are trying to tackle the issues,  relating to the pandemic,  kind of in a long cycle, meaning that if you’ve got a long planning time to do something for the membership of your organizations, be they,  church, a mosque,  a synagogue,  a scout camp, a  church camp of any type, we’ve got to keep our eye on the ball because,  the currents are changing and,  we have to keep things up.

I love this quote from Warren Buffet. The quote is, Only when the tide goes out do we find out who’s been swimming naked.  And basically, he used this in terms of financial issues. And this was at a time when we had, about a little over 10 years ago when we had a financial,  reversal.  One of my neighbors here in California, he had a summer home. He gave me this quote when I gave a talk in Washington, DC,   kind of addressing the fact that there’s a lot under the waterline that can be done properly. But when the crises hit,  you find out who may have been bluffing and why it’s so important. Now, over the last 37 years, we’ve developed a framework,  that we use to look at the high-performance envelope of any organization.  And it’s a nonprofit, a for-profit, , an innovation company, a medical company, an aviation company, an IT company,  or a mission, there are really,  the high performance envelope is really defined by, three things, great leadership, the practices and best practices, and the technologies that enable those practices. So, we just want to share with you the potential of using such a framework,  in our discussion this morning.  We’re also going to address what Pastor Rick Warren, my pastor at Saddleback Church,  delivered this last Sunday, which was absolutely terrific.  Those of you that know Rick Warren know that he is followed by and that many,  people of,  of the Catholic faith,  of the Jewish faith of the Muslim faith really looked to him,  for guidance, not in terms of theological, but issues that might be very detailed of which he is very competent.

But really,  in terms of leadership and in terms of serving the critical needs of the membership of an organization, he delivered a tremendous message this last week,  which is entirely available@saddleback.com.  He covered the power of tears and why tears are so important. And he concluded with the four things that we can do to help a friend in pain. And those of you that are ministers, and those of you that are, are our pastors and chaplain pastors at medical centers, those of you that, that are leaders of your mosque or of your synagogue, or a priest in a community , these are not specific to any sort of theological  nuance, but they really apply to our human nature and why it’s so important to address those things.

And so, what we’ll do today is,  we always start our webinars or our podcast when we can, with the voice of the patient, and voice of our audience. And so,  Jennifer Dingman is a wonderful individual. She’s founder of Pulse, focused on patient safety issues,  and we’ve worked with her for over a decade.  Most noteworthy is the fact that Jennifer was one of our Saturday morning group of non-medical people who actually led a grassroots effort that led to the government’s first paper performance program that,  total count isn’t in yet. But, tens of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives were saved because of the work of this small group starting a grassroots effort. And it really showed that government really can work. I know we’ve got a lot of people that don’t trust government these days, all of us in some way or another, but this is where government really worked. And they validated and verified that this happened. She won the Pete Conrad Patient Safety Award, as did the entire team. So we’ll go to Jennifer, she’ll be live a little bit later; we were a little worried about her IT system on her side.  So, she recorded this last night – the voice of the patient for you.

Jeni, thank you so much for being our voice of the patient today.

Jennifer Dingman:  Thank you, Dr. Denham, for having me.  I’m very excited about today’s webinar. There is so much the faith-based community can do to help people with covid and some of these dreadful shootings that we’re seeing, and we’re really hoping to encourage and inspire them with this webinar today. I’ll hand it back to you Dr. Denham and thank you again for having me.

Dr. Charles Denham:  Thank you, Jeni.

So, we are very, very blessed to have,  Jeni to be,  she has been the voice of the patient, actually for this entire program, focused on the Coronavirus,  and our Community of Practice over the last, 24 months now, 25 months.   We have Lacey Hart, who is an administrator at the Mayo Clinic, where I had the privilege of being on faculty and,  she has not only led great work at Mayo Clinic, but is also an ordained minister, and she’ll be responding.  for those of you that will be listening to our podcast and subsets of our podcast, we have Dr. Greg Botz,  who is our Chief Clinical Leader,  regarding our clinical information. He’s both a full professor at the University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center and Critical Care and Anesthesia. He’s also a full,  professor and adjunct professor at Stanford Medical Center, where he trained and did an additional fellowship in, simulation, and is a great champion of deliberative practice.

Also a faith-based man, and comes from a faith-based family who, is very supportive of the mind, body spirit approach.  Dr. Toff Peabody, Christopher Peabody,  is a young man that I’ve known, now in his thirties,  however, I’ve known him since our joint Harvard years when I was a fellow at Harvard, non-faculty there. And he was a third-year medical student. He’s an emergency medicine doctor, and assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine. Noteworthy is the fact that he’s the Director of the Innovation Center for Critical for Acute Care at the University of California San Francisco. And it, we are going to put links in and segway to the five rights of emergency care for those that are watching on a longer, on our longer form. So, we’re very blessed to have Toff talk with us.

Charlie Denham and David Beshk have jointly produced something called the Family Lifeguard. We’ll mention it in brief regarding Good Samaritan Care. And the podcast and webinar links to that and clips will be made available – really critical at this point in time. And we’re doing R and D this summer to address how families can prepare for active shooter events or earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.  And we have Heather Foster, who will also be on record.  She has been up all night in the ICU and will be with us on the streaming material that we’ll have, but not live today.

We have Lacey Hart, as I described, has done a terrific job in addressing the issues of care of the caregiver.  And, we’ll come back to you, Lacey.  But I just want to give a pitch to our audience on a tremendous program that she has started to administer to the caregivers, and the webinar that we had,  April 21st,  where she was so articulate in terms of this challenging area.  And she can share a little bit more about the program that she offers as well.  And we’re gonna have her kind of to react to what we’re hearing.  So for those of you that haven’t been with us before, we’ll just review very quickly our purpose, mission, and values.  Our purpose is we will measure our success by how we protect and enrich the lives of families, patients, and caregivers. And this is the mind, body, and spirit. The spiritual side is as critical to us as the other two.  Our mission is to focus on performance solutions that save lives, save money, create value in the communities we serve, and our core values, which we try to live every day. And as with all organizations, are we perfect? No. But we try to live these values of integrity, compassion, accountability, reliability, and entrepreneurship.  None of our speakers, both in the streaming version,  our podcast or webinars, have nothing to disclose about a product, service or technology. We never have received direct, indirect, or affiliated funding in any way from a pharmaceutical or device company in healthcare. All of the funding is through philanthropy.  We do not seek donations from our audience so that we have no conflicts of interest.  For those of you that want to go back and download information, which I’ll talk about today, you can go to the our  https://www.medtacglobal.org, and click on the webinar for this session.

And you’ll be able to download the slides if you’re on the podcast, and you’ll be able to download other documents. Over the last 24 months, we have undertaken a number of webinars, converted them to mini documentaries, but we’ve also ported them to podcasts that you could watch,  in your car or when you’re working out or don’t have access to a screen.  If you go to our website@medtechglobal.org,  you can view our Q2 – 2022 progress report, which articulates what we’ve covered and the work that we’ve been doing.  Now, interestingly,  we started an Emerging Threats community of practice, a group working together from top medical centers on approximately 30 visible and invisible threats that are keeping our leaders up at night, or once they find out about some of these topics, should keep them up at night.  And it’s interesting that one of the topics was,  the issue of,  of epidemics.  The organizations that are participating include Mayo Clinic, Harvard, UCIU,  USCUCSF, Stanford Medical Center, MD Anderson, university of Florida, and a number of other organizations over time, and the readiness for pandemics. And unfortunately, it looks like we’ve got some more bugs coming down, down the pipe,   now.  And, we were hoping that we would be able to stop delivering this second webinar every month. So, we do two 90-minute webinars, but, it looks like we’ve got a little bit of a train coming down.  The tracks at us. Over the last 37 years, we’ve undertaken a number of non-profit and for-profit,  initiatives that has allowed us to aggregate 3,100 hospitals in 3000 communities.  And we draw on a pool of experts of 500 subject matter experts.  When Covid struck in March of 2020, we started with 60 experts from clinical, operational, financial, and other areas. They ranged from as old as someone in their eighties. And we actually got input from young people,  regarding their perceptions of safety. We also,  added clips from our two documentaries, Discovery Channel Documentaries, Chasing Zero and Surfing The Healthcare Tsunami, and shoots that we’ve already undertaken for one on Bystander Rescue Care,  entitled Three Minutes and Counting.  You can go to our website to see the list and watch the video of all the topics we covered for speed today. We won’t go through them, but we’ve undertaken more than 48 – 90 minute programs, 24 Survive and Thrive training programs. And most importantly, we’ve undertaken a study of more than 1000 family households that’s allowed us to produce our Survive and Thrive Guide programs.

So for those that are watching the video,  you can see the list of topics that we’ve covered.  I’m not going to read them off for the podcast viewers, but we’ve had a great blessing in covering a number of different topics ranging from care at home, emergency care, and you’ll see a number of those things in our program today. Before we start to focus on the faith-based issues, we also have the honor of having a youth and young adult team of high school students,  even some medical middle school students, but many students and alumni from our leading universities,  ranging from the east Coast, West Coast, and Midwest.  And we’re very, very blessed to have these college students and high school students working together to build awareness of opportunities to have impact.

What we started with at first, we realized nobody is covering, is taking care of the families of critical essential workers. There were 16 critical essential,  industries or infrastructure workers segments declared by Homeland Security.  And then in August of 2020,  all educators, including teachers and those services that provide educational information to teachers from lower middle, high school, college, and,  higher education. And so what happened was, we started to deliver these programs to them, and the general public hoped on it and said, wow, that’s something that we really need. And our hypothesis was, if you save the families, you save the worker. Our hypothesis was that most of the spread would likely not be at work, but would be at home. And that proved to be true. So, you could go to our website at,  www.medtacglobal.org and watch short videos, medi lifelong videos this summer, we’re porting all of the most important videos, updating them, and they’ll be entitled Med Tac Minutes.

And the pitch is in the, in less time that it takes for EMS to arrive if you called 911, we’ll tell you how to save a life and focus. Our 1000 family household study has been undertaken,  over the last 24 months, and it has been the feeder route to the information that we cover.   And our study,  was focused on readiness response, rescue,  recovery and resilience as categories for families and how they could tackle those issues. And,  the research has been undertaken with a number of organizations, many I articulated earlier,  the medical centers. We’ve added the University of Texas Southwestern, and a number of other organizations to those. So where are we today? We’ve got this evolution of,  of the variants and of the virus from the alpha. The beta gamma was appeared shortly, but the delta and then omicron, and now we have the sub,  Omicron  lineage.

We know that the majority of testing is happening at home – it’s not only PCR tests anymore.  We don’t see the deaths rising right now. But we’ve had a huge rise in the number of cases over the last two to three weeks.  And of note, it’s only anecdotal, but of our researchers that we work with at major medical centers, many of, I would say three quarters of the families are sick at home with Covid.  We also look at the projections of the The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Washington State. And this, we downloaded this morning, gives you kind of a, for a bit of a forecast of what we’re looking at in terms of daily deaths. So, we’re seeing, what we’re basically seeing is we’re seeing a real rise in sewage water presence of covid, which is probably the most reliable.  We’re seeing an increase in testing.  So a lot of people are getting sick that are getting PCR tests, and they’re not counting any of the, any of the home tests,  or very few of those.  But we’re seeing hospitalization lower. We’ve gotten pretty good at it. So, the high-performance envelope is what we talked about.  Let’s dig in quickly to what our promise was for the webinar,  that we proposed to in our invitation, to those of you that join us,  are joining us live. And for those that are joining in the podcast, supportive loved ones in the hospital, best practices on long covid care, dealing with grief during the pandemic, delivering safe, good Samaritan care, and loving friends and family through division. So support loved ones in the hospital.

We are not going to recap our last month’s webinar or podcast, but just wanna draw your attention to the fact,  that in our 1000,  family household study,  and you can, from the slides and from the website for those that are on the podcast, can go to our website.  What we really learned is that our critical care processes have dramatically improved proving it really helped patients.   However,  if we have big surges again, it will start to limit the number of people that can go and visit their families in the ICU.   ICU numbers are down,  and folks in the hospital are down. If we get surges, you’re gonna see more masking, less people visiting.  But we’re seeing a dramatic improvement. And we’re seeing the antiviral medications are helping if they’re delivered within 24 hours of people that are at high risk for progression, and for those that might have preexisting healthcare issues.

So those of you that are pastors, hospital visits, important, critical, to wear a mask. The three Fs of masking are filter, fit, and finish.  A cloth mask – it won’t cut it.  I would not go to visit anybody in the hospital without a surgical grade mask, or preferably an N 95 mask. But,  if you said, well, I have a surgical mask and I have an N 95 mask, but the N 95 mask doesn’t fit very well, Dr. Denham, what should I do?  Remember fit?  So filter, fit, and finish.  The the N 95 mask has a little better filter. But, if you’ve got air escaping around the mask, that’s critical, and once you’ve been in the hospital with known covid cases, do not touch the outer surface of the mask when you make your visitation,  to,  to patients.

Also, the high contact surfaces, it’s as important as it always to wash our hands. Now that we know aerosol spread is important,  we still must consider the fact that high contact surfaces are issues. Now, long covid is a really, really critical issue. Our 1000 family household study, and I just have to share with you, I’ve got more, I’ve got six or seven friends that are suffering from long covid today, are having a hard time getting out of bed, some days are good, some days are bad. I have friends that are scratch golfers that can’t go out to the golf course. People that are marathon runners, people that are high level executives, where their cognitive ability is critical. We had, in one of our prior webinars, the head of emergency response for MD Anderson got long covid and still is getting lost, when giving presentations.

So, what have we learned? Go to a long covid clinic. We’re right at the beginning of learning about this. However, it’s critical. And one anecdote, we don’t have a study to back it up, but most of the people I know that start feeling better overexert themselves. And boom, they’re one step forward and two steps back. What’s critical is the fact that you get inflammation, inflammation of multiple organ systems and, and those that are, that feel like, well, if I get it, it’ll be a mild case, no problem.  Even people with mild cases or even possibly relatively asymptomatic cases can lead to long covid and long-term inflammation in multiple organ systems. So, the long covid clinics have all the, the most experience, everyone that I’ve sent to a long covid clinic that are friends, and again, I’m a retired doctor, I’m not practicing medicine, but those friends that I’ve sent and helped get into long covid clinics have had a very, very positive,   result.

And there’s a lot of data that’s not being published. Also, I recommend the Survivor Corps. Survivor Corps was started by someone with long covid. You can go on the web and look at what they offer,  and,  I think this is a great initiative.  We have to learn from others that have long covid and the tricks, and the tips on living with it. And those of you that are pastors and, and nonclinical people, the advice that you can give when people just aren’t doing well, is to just make sure to get with their own physician.  If there’s a possibility they have long covid, asking the personal physician for a referral to one of the long Covid clinics.  And everyone’s learning.  So, it’s taking time. So today, with Lacey, we’re gonna be talking about dealing with grief during the pandemic, and calling on Rick Warren to help us with that, with this wonderful presentation that he gave us.

And Dr. Kubler Ross, stages still hold true. I’m a retired cancer doctor.  I saw this play out in my practice. So over many, many years,  denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I’d just like to draw your attention to the fact that you cannot be just grieving over the loss of a loved one. And we probably have anywhere from five to 20 million people who are grieving the loss of a family member or a close friend.  We have, you know, a huge number of children,  hundreds of thousands of children that have felt the loss of a parent.  And so, what we dealt with, and what I dealt with as a cancer doctor, or those of you that have dealt with terminal illness, these processes are there now.  Before I move on to the Jewish faith and again, as we get input from our friends in multiple denominations and multiple religions they all have, everyone has a different approach to tackling these areas.

I just want to draw your attention to, though you can be grieving your health. You can be grieving over the loss of what you had before. And these are very powerful,  very powerful,  phenomenon and processes that are at place. So those of you that are pastors and rabbis and priests and caregivers and social workers, you know, grief is real. Grief of your health is very real. It doesn’t have to be the loss of a loved one.  And it’s interesting, in preparing for this program, I went to look at the Jewish faith, and there’s a lot of  great teaching using the Book of Job and the story of Job that is used in Christianity and used in many, many faiths.

My contact with the Muslim faith is as a Boy Scout leader and their Boy Scout troops that are so – but I know the least about that, and maybe you can help me a little bit, Lacey.  So, Rick Warren gave a terrific,    talk,  a wonderful sermon,  on the 28^th of May. You can stream it. We downloaded it. We’ve put the transcript and the message notes from Rick Warren’s sermon on the website, so you can download them, listen to them, and make notes. This is the introduction that he made to that sermon on Sunday.

Rick Warren:  You know, in the past 14 days, our nation has been reeling with shock and anger and, grief. First in Buffalo, New York, in a supermarket, 10 black people died in a racist shooting. Then right down the street from us, the next day at this Lake Forest, Saddleback Campus, a sister church on the same El Toro Road from us, six elderly Asian people were shot to death in a church service just right down the street from this campus where I’m teaching you right now. And then this week in Uvalde, a Texas Elementary School, 19 children and two adults so far have died from a senseless shooting there. This week,  I posted these words to millions of social media followers. As a parent who’s lost one of my own children to gun violence, I beg you to pray for the grieving parents of Uvalde. You’ll quickly forget this horror that’s going on right now, and you’re gonna move on with your life, but they’re gonna have to carry this grief the rest of their lives.  So please don’t forget them.

Now, besides these shootings, we’ve had 6.3 million people have died from Covid, and that’s leaving millions of millions of relatives and friends grieving their losses. What are you supposed to do about all this grief in the world? As I was driving to this campus to deliver this message today,  I happened to call one of the guys on my team and found out that his family just had a death in their family. Today, I, if you’re a Christian, God expects you to help others in their pain and in their grief. The Bible says this in Second Corinthians Chapter One, Verses Three and Four.  God comforts us in our troubles so that we can comfort others in their troubles with the same comfort that we ourselves have received from God. So, God helps us in our problems and our grief, so we can help other people in their problems and their grief with the comfort we’ve received. Now, in light of all of the things that we have to grieve about in the world today, the question I wanna look at this weekend is this:  how do we do that?  How can you help those in your life? Help a friend who, who’s in deep need, who’s in deep pain, who’s in deep grief? Do you know what to do? Are you prepared to help your friends when they go through the inevitable grief of life?

Dr. Charles Denham:  He will cover:  Don’t wait: Take the initiative to connect;  Don’t hold back:  let them see your tears; Don’t speak: Show up and shut up;  and, Don’t forget: All the tears are temporary.  And we will be sharing the tapes of those. Now, let’s talk about Safe, Good Samaritan care, and we’ll be very quick.  We’ll go to Lacey as soon as we finish this initial set of promises that we made to you before we dig deeply into what Rick Warren has shared with us. So, the delivery Safe, Good Samaritan Care,  it’s a really difficult time. We’re afraid of getting the disease.  Over the last 24 months, we covered emergency rescue skills and covid care. We’ll draw your attention to, and you’ll see links in our podcast of the five Rights of Emergency Care, which is a framework that I put together with input from the likes of Toff Peabody and the other emergency medicine doctors.

We have actually three chairman of major medical center emergency departments who have been great contributors to,  to my development of the Five Rights Of Emergency Care, and help really affirm why these things are so important, the right provider, the right diagnosis, the right treatment, the right discharge, and the right follow-up. Go to the major medical center. Go take your family member to, or those of you that are pastors or faith-based leaders, make sure that your flock get to the major medical center where their medical records are, where they have the bench strength to really be able to deal,  with the challenges and make sure that the families understand that aerosol risk. The big, the big thing we’ve learned,  over the last 24 months is aerosol risk is critical. We’ve had good friends and, colleagues who have taken grandma or grandpa to the hospital, not wearing masks, got them to the hospital.  Everybody in the family got sick, and then grandma or grandpa died, and they didn’t get to see them. And they’re suffering not only grief, but they’re sick with covid at home. And so critical to recognize that aerosol ventilation, masking and really understanding the power of quarantine and isolation is really there.  Even with milder cases after you’ve had the vaccine.  And then finally providing care at home.   We thoroughly reviewed the work that we did last year on this. And by applying the principles of known aerosol risk and a little bit less concern regarding high contact surfaces, we still found that the checklists that we put together to manage care at home are very solid. We took the CDC and NIH recommendations. We had nurses, doctors and caregivers and an infectious disease  preventionist look at them, help develop them with us.  And so they are – and we recommend that you go to our website, those of you that are listening, and those that are watching,  to be able to download those checklists.

And finally, loving friends and family through this division that we’ve got in our country.  I’m showing for those of you that are just listening,  I’ll dig into,  the concepts of misinformation, disinformation, and malformation, and also the movable middle. There are many people that are just absolutely,   you know, they, they believe either for or against some of the prevention,  safe practices, and we understand that. And there’s no need to pick a fight with people that have an entrenched belief once you’ve presented the science. But there’s a movable medal that just are just concerned about the, the doubt that has been created. So, we worked with our students and those that are watching the webinar.

We have wonderful students from leading organizations, and we put, put together a video program called the Vaccination Conversation. Right at the time when we were releasing it,  there were many, many people receiving death threats and,  terrible trolling comments on the web. We just did not want to put our students at risk. Many of them are applying to medical school, law school, business school, and put them at risk, even though each and every one of them said, Dr. Denham, it’s okay.  Let’s go ahead. We thought better part to work with organizations that that maybe would be less personal and personal risk, and we’re so pleased to be working with,  with USSC, and feel free to go to our website and see a terrific set of videotapes called Team Player and many other videos that they’ve done.  We’re working on some for,  dealing with the Fentanyl crisis and, and others.

Now, let’s talk about misinformation, disinformation, and malformation.  People throw a lot of these terms around and say that everything is disinformation, which really, in a pure sense, with those that really understand information, truth,  and, and false statements.  There’s a little bit better definition that we can all use.  So, what we think about in information that those of us in our membership organizations are hearing, there’s false information, and there’s information that is true.  And there’s information that is shared with the intent to harm even true information. So, let’s go through these three topics. Misinformation are unintentional mistakes such as inaccurate photos, dates, statistics, translations,  where spreading of false information occurs that you think is true. I have many, many friends that are sending me all kinds of misinformation regarding the covid crisis that has been politically generated.  And the information that is shared might be old. It might not be pertinent to the topic. It might be true, but,  but it’s not shared with me with now intent. And it’s inaccurately shared to come up with a conclusion.  So, in the case of misinformation, we don’t have intent to harm. Now, this information is fabricated or deliberately manipulated. Audio, visual content, audio or visual content intentionally created, conspiracy theories, generation of defamation, and that kind of thing.  It has both falseness and intent to harm. And that is amply generated across the web. And then mal information, which is not frequently described as deliberate abuse of private information with the intent to harm or intimidate,  to the, the case of patient safety that always comes up with us is a nurse in Washington state whose HR file was released to the press after she made a systems related,  error.  A great nurse, never had a problem, never did anything bad, but it harmed a child, and when they released information that is personal information from her HR file, she committed suicide. So that’s a case where malformation, that there was an intent to harm her reputation, to make her look like a bad apple in the eyes of the public before a, a trial, a malpractice trial. And, that was used to do that.

So, before we dig right into some of the spiritual,  advice of,  Rick Warren, Lacey Hart, as I mentioned, is an administrator at the Mayo Clinic. She’s developed a wonderful program for caregivers, which I’m gonna have her describe. Lacey,  would you please kind of react to this first set of information that we’ve provided so we can then really dig into how we take care of and help people that are in pain?

Lacey Hart:  Absolutely. Thank you. And thank you for having me today. I think my first reaction is, you know, especially when you’re talking about the grief and some of the words we use, and the word we use in the caregiving space is moral distress. And it is, when you try to combine that mind, body, spirit, , but even if you take a religious aspect, there’s, there’s distress because there’s beliefs and there’s abilities while being impacted by a pandemic. And so, it can, you know, it causes anxiety. It causes a lot more emotions than just grief. And it comes in waves too. So, you can’t get through the cycle. You keep getting bombarded with those waves. And that’s what we’re really seeing with our caretakers.  And the caretakers are in an awkward, awkward position because they’re trying to provide care, but they’re exposed, and their normal protocols don’t always work.

And so it puts them in this where they have to make decisions that they’re not used to making.  And that’s what’s causing this distress. Now, we did start, so I’m very pleased we started a hope to healing foundation, and it was really around this, , healing or, and, and kind of getting through this. But the first thing we learned as we started working with people is just coping mechanisms.  We have been in a privileged society here in the United States in particular, where we haven’t had to deal with some things where you actually have to have coping skills. And so that, that’s been the first step. And the other one that surprised me, I don’t know why it surprised me, but it was the spiritual disconnect, and it was the spiritual disconnect with the environments in which they were in. So I, I found it fascinating to talk to a Catholic hospital, and I actually asked how much they talk about their faith during this time with their employees, and they said they don’t, they were so afraid of actually, you know, talking about the faith because they didn’t wanna alienate, but at the same time, it caused moral distress for all of those who actually joined the organization to align their values with that faith.  So, it’s just kind of really this not understanding how to deal with these complex situations, , that we’re now faced with.

Dr. Charles Denham:  Right. Well, thank you very much. And we want you to share after we listen to Rick,  love to have you kind of apply that. And I wanna be sensitive to the fact that maybe you know more about some of the other facts than I do.  So, jump in there.  and I just found that it was just kind of a wonderful,  as Albert Einstein said, , that there’s no such thing as a coincidence. It’s God’s way of,  remaining anonymous. And when Rick Warren shared his sermon, I thought, wow, this has really got some meat for anyone who is caring for anyone,  Be it a pastor,  a rabbi, a priest, or  a Muslim,  faith-based leader. So please help me as we, as we go through that.

Well, I’m going to share and just keep going, and I’ve got some segments from Rick, and then I think we’ll have,  you know, we’ll be able to kind of share that.  So,  thank you very much,  for your input. And,  and I wanna thank in advance,  those who are recording their comments for our podcast.  So, let’s talk about faith-based covid leadership and what we’ve learned, those that we’ve interviewed.  I have to tell you, it’s a really tough time. And, and everyone that I talked to were really, really ill prepared to serve their communities.  And,  we just had never had a pandemic – we hadn’t had lockdown. Many of the folks that were  faith-based leaders had very little scientific training.  All of it sounded really scary, lockdowns and,  the potential risk.  I, one of the churches that I attend,  anybody over 65,  was not going to be allowed to go to the church. And, I helped train the medical leaders in security force for voluntary security force for that church.  And it was not, it was knocking people out that,  that are, that live their life to serve. So, our voluntary pastoral workforce or you know, service – servant leaders were also hit and nobody was ready for it. So, I think we really need to think about that as we focus,  audit. , we, and I’ve written about this in the Journal of Patient Safety, and we’ve used this for our films now, 10 years ago,  kinda interesting in my prayer journal this morning. It was the, today, 10 years ago, Dennis Quaid and I shot an AARP video segment as a companion to our Discovery Channel film. And in that film, I address the, these four areas, head, heart, hands, voice, when we’re trying to help a group. And, and I have the privilege of mentoring a lot of Eagle Scouts right now, or, or eagle candidates who then will be putting rescue stations here in Southern California, long beaches at churches and parks.

I always say, look, there’s no consolidated or no clear definition of leadership. The one that I’ve come up with is a leader is someone that can help a group of individuals get to a destination that they couldn’t get to on their own. And they do so by appealing to the logic, the head, the what are the facts? What’s the information, the heart? How will we motivate in a group either with the fear of failure, the fear of harm.  I’m a more positively grounded person, I wanna know about winning. I wanna know about doing the best for others.  And then, what do we do if we have the head and the heart and the right direction? And I’m a real – I love the book Switch by Heath and Heath,  that actually cites Don Berwick, one of our leaders in healthcare.

And they talk about the elephant, the rider in the past. The path the elephant is our emotion.  The rider is our intelligence, and the path is the new path we wanna go. And without getting the emotion in the right direction, no matter what the rider wants to do, they’re not gonna go down the new path. And then voice, how can you get the word to spread to help reinforce,  those best practices?  So, leaders,  inspire a group to adopt the best or better practices of the day for the targeted result. And then they use technology as an enabler. For many years, we loved,  technology and, and actually as a biomedical engineer, I could tell you technology is not, is not defined as it or a device.  Technology can be a process.

And,  I’m really proud to be a member of the Saddleback Church.  This, these are the mesh message notes of,  Rick Warren. His technology is to keep you engaged as he’s giving this sermon,  by having you fill out a message notes that are typically only on one page.  As you see there, I’ve already given you the notes in red and highlighted in yellow, but you have a blank form and pencils are provided, and it allows you through a sermon to actually listen to what the speaker’s saying. But writing in,  what you want to know are fill, are filling in the blank. And so that’s a technology. And he, and, and Rick Warren uses it very well. Now, how successful is he at using some of these,  technologies? He’s won the, the Gist Book of World Records. He has four records, I believe.  His book is the leading non-fiction book of all time,  other than the Holy Bible.  It’s translated in more, I think more than 130 languages.

This subject matter here, we are not covering today. So, I really recommend you go and listen to the whole sermon.  And he sets things up with the open that you heard a little bit earlier. And then he says, look, there’s a priceless value to tears. Tears are God’s gift for expressing emotion. Tears are liquid emotions. Tears are what makes us human. They’re three types. Basil, that just keeps your eyes, your eyes moist, reactive. That’s when you’re, when you smell onions and you tear, and emotional tears are a normal and healthy,  and healthy part of life. He says that God says feelings are meant to be felt. And number four, tears are a universal language.  He also defines sympathy versus empathy. And I’ll let him kind of describe a little bit more of this ministry of presence.  But as we look at,  look at having to tackle potentially more variants,  as we reset our churches,   our faith-based organizations and get back to being a community working together, people are gonna get cancer, people are gonna be in car accidents.  We’ve had a number of deaths of people that I know.  A principal of one of the schools here where I am at Laguna Beach did not wake up a few days ago.  And really just a terrible time. So how, so Rick Warren says how to help a friend in pain. And so, I’m gonna go through the clips quickly, Lacey, and then really have a discussion with you of how we can apply these. And you’re a formerly trained minister.    You know, I wish I had another life to go through to be able to do that, and I’m proud of you that you have.  But love to have a discussion.  Rick says, don’t wait. Take the initiative to connect. Don’t hold back. Let them see your tears. Don’t speak. Show up and shut up and pay attention to what happened when his son committed suicide. And don’t forget, all tears are temporary.  So, let’s hear Rick,  describe, the first one, his introduction to this section. And number one, about don’t wait.

Rick Warren:  Here’s how to help anybody who’s in deep pain or grief. And we learn the steps to take by looking at the example of Job’s, friends in scripture, you know, the Book of Job. And you know, the story of Job, how he lost literally everything overnight. He lost his health. He lost all of his kids. He lost his family.  Terrorists killed his family. He lost his crops, he lost his wealth, his health, everything. And he got a terrible,  chronic disease. It was painful.  Everything just happened wrong in just a matter of hours in Job’s life. You also probably know that Job’s friends, if you’ve ever heard anybody preach on this, have made a bunch of mistakes in handling Job’s, suffering. But you know, what you don’t hear about is the stuff they did, right? Not everything Job’s friends did was wrong.  In fact, the first three things they did were the exact three right things to do. When you have a friend who’s in pain, suffering, grief, or anything else, it, it was only after they started speaking their opinions that Job’s friends got into trouble. But at first Job’s friends did three things exactly right? And these are the three first three steps that you should take when you see somebody grieving in the world with deep pain, whether they’re a friend or they’re a stranger. Okay? Write these down. Number one, when you see somebody in pain, like, we’ve seen this last week, number one, don’t wait. Take the initiative to connect. Don’t wait, take the initiative to connect. A common mistake that people make is this. They don’t feel comfortable around people who are in pain. They don’t feel comfortable around people who’ve had a loss or are grieving.

And they say, I don’t know what to say. So, they do nothing. They wait for the other person to contact them. That’s not going to happen. You have to take the initiative. Don’t wait, take the initiative. This is the first thing that Job’s three friends did correctly. Job Chapter Two, Verse 11 says this, when Job’s, friends heard about all the troubles that had come upon Job, they left their home, okay? And they agreed to go together and sympathize with Job and comfort him. They’re going to his house, they’re taking the initiative. They’re not waiting for him to call. They’re gonna go see him, and they go together to comfort their friend. Don’t wait. Take the initiative to contact somebody that probably needs your help this week. You might wanna sit down and write a name next to that Point. Number one, I need to make contact with that person. I know they’re in pain. I know they’re having a hard time. Write their name down next to 1. I’m gonna take the initiative to contact them this week.

Two, don’t hold back. Let them see your tears.  Don’t hold back. Let them see your tears. This is the second thing that Job’s friends did, right? And it’s what you need to do when you see somebody in pain yourself. They didn’t just sympathize. I’m sorry, you hurt Job. They empathized. We hurt with you. They hurt with Job. They entered into his pain. They cried with him. They didn’t, they weren’t ashamed to shed tears. That’s verse 12, Job two, Verse 12, when Job’s, friends saw him from a distance, remember they’re going to visit their friend who’s lost everything. When Job’s, friends saw him from a distance, they hardly recognized him. He was in so much pain and grief, and he had this terrible disease. They, they, they barely recognized him. And it says this, they began to weep aloud. This is in public, okay? They’re weeping aloud. And it says, then they tore their clothes in grief, and they threw dust in the air over their heads as a sign of sadness.

Now, if you’ve ever been to the Middle East, you know that these last two actions are two ancient ways to express grief. Ripping your clothes is a sign of grief. And throwing dust in the air, over your head, is a sign of grief.  Everybody in that day and in that tradition understood what they were doing. Three ways. They’re grieving, weeping, and the tearing of their clothes and throwing dust in the air. Okay? Now you may not have to do those other two things,  but weeping and crying is still universally understood all around the world. Everybody’s gonna understand when you cry, what that means.  So, take the initiative. Don’t wait. Take the time to connect. Number two, don’t hold back.  Let them see your tears.

Here’s number three. Don’t speak. Just show up and shut up. You say, I don’t know what to say.  Say nothing. That’s the best thing you do. Let them see it through your tears. Tears will speak, show up and shut up. There’s nothing you can say when somebody is in pain that’s gonna cheer them up. In fact, they don’t want to be cheered up. They don’t wanna be cheered up. You know, when Kay and I lost our son Matthew to mental illness and he died by suicide, we knew that we were gonna go through grief. And grief is like waves. One minute you can handle the next minute, you can’t. One minute you can handle the next minute. you can’t.  And your wave will never match the wave of your spouse or anybody else. We all grieve at different times. And so that often can create conflict in a family because everybody grieves differently in different ways and different times. But what we decided is that we would,  we would notice that if one of us was triggered by a sound, by a sight, by a song, by music, by  a taste, and we saw that the other person was going through one of those waves of grief, one minute I can handle it. The next minute I can’t. That we would simply walk over, put our arm around them, and stand with ’em and say, nothing. Show up. And shut up. Kay and I will never forget how much comfort we received from our own small group. When our youngest son, who had struggled his entire life with mental illness,  took his life.

Matthew had been at our home,  the night before, the day before, and we’d played games together, watched some TV.  We had no trouble in our relationship at that moment.  And, as he left, Matthew said to me, dad, I’m just so tired. I’m, I’m so tired. And then we didn’t hear from him for 24 hours. And that’s very unusual ’cause we kept a close relationship with our son. He lived by himself in a home. And finally we decided we’d drive over and see how he’s doing. His car was in his driveway, and the door was locked, and he wouldn’t answer the door. And we feared that what we had prayed would never happen, but feared might happen someday had happened. So, we called the police and asked them to come and break the door down. And as we’re waiting for the police to come, Kay and I were standing there in that driveway, holding each other, sobbing, just sobbing.

Kay was wearing a necklace that had two words on it that were the title of a book she had just written. And she held it up to me as I was standing so close to her, and it said, choose joy. And I said, how do you choose joy when your heart is breaking in a million pieces? The police came, broke the door down, and discovered that our son had taken his life. It was the worst day of my life. One of the things that helped us get through that was within minutes, our small group, a Saddleback small group, they showed up on the driveway, and the guys got around me, and they just hugged me. And the women got around Kay and just hugged her. They didn’t say anything, show up and shut up. There was nothing they could say that would make us feel any better.

There was no words that you could say, when people are going through that kind of grief, it’s just touch, show up and shut up. It’s the ministry of presence. And that small group said to us, we’re not leaving you alone tonight. We don’t have anything to say that’s important. We can’t. There’s nothing we can do to take away the pain of this horror in your life, but we don’t wanna leave you alone. We’re gonna, we’re gonna be with you tonight. So, they came to our house and they stayed with us, and they slept in the kitchen and in the living room, and on the couch and on the floor. It was just being with us. Show up and shut up. The third thing it says of Job’s friends, is this Job Two 13: then Job’s, friends sat on the ground with him, circled him in silence for seven days and nights. That’s friendship. They sat on the ground with a guy who’d lost everything, in silence for seven days and nights. No one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was.

So when you have a friend in pain, don’t wait. Take the initiative to connect. Don’t hold back. Let them see your tears. Don’t speak. It’s not, there’s nothing you can say that’s gonna make a feel any better. Show up and shut up. And here’s the fourth thing. There’s one final thing you need to do, and it’s this. Don’t forget, remember, all tears are temporary. Don’t forget, remember, all tears are temporary. No matter how bad the pain or grief is in that moment, it will not. And it cannot last forever. Because one day God’s gonna settle the score. God’s gonna right the wrongs. God’s gonna soothe all of our hurts. Three times in the Bible, God promises that one day tears will no longer be needed three times. So, I wanna close this message with those three verses, these three great promises. The first is Isaiah 25, Verse Eight.  It says this – notice on your outline: the sovereign Lord will destroy death forever. So there’ll be no more death after this. He will wipe away the tears from everyone’s eyes. That’s a promise. He will wipe away the tears from everyone’s eyes and take away the disgraces. People have suffered throughout the world. You may have suffered abuse, you may have suffered disgrace. You may have suffered rejection, you may have suffered betrayal. He will take away all of that, the disgrace that people have suffered throughout the world. The second promise is Revelation 17. This is a scene in heaven one day. Then the lamb on the throne, that’s Jesus. Then the lamb on the throne will shepherd them and lead them. That’s us to the springs, to the spring waters of life. And here’s the second time he says it in scripture, God will wipe every last tear from their eyes. Every tear is temporary. They’re not gonna last. There will be a time. There will be no tears anymore. The last verse says this, Revelation 21. This is the end of the Bible in Revelation 21, at the very end of the Bible, Verses Four to Seven, it says this: then God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. That’s the third time he says it in scripture. There will be no more death and no more mourning and no more crying and no more pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

Then he who was seated on the throne said, I am making everything new. Write this down for these words are trustworthy and true. And he said to me, it is done. This is God talking. Jesus. I am the Alpha and the Omega. I am the beginning and the end to him who is thirsty. I will give drink without cost from the spring of the water of life. And he who overcomes will inherit all of this, and I will be his God and he will be my child.  No more tears that friends is a scene worth shedding some tears over right now. Tears of joy, tears of hope, tears of expectation.  Because no matter what you’re going through, it will not last. And one day that’s gonna happen. Those three verses are gonna happen, and there’ll be no more death and no more sorrow and no more pain, and no more grief and no more problems, and no more criticism and no more rejection, and no more betrayal and no more illness, and no more cancer. No more death. He will wipe away every tear from everyone’s eyes. And there will be no need for the priceless value of tears anymore.

Dr. Charles Denham:  So, Lacey, your thoughts about these four areas, and we could just take one of them, one by one and, don’t wait. Take the initiative con to connect. We have a lot of people in healthcare, but many of us are Alpha Dog.  I’ll do it on my own, in isolation. And this last 24 months has been pretty brutal for those of us in healthcare. But this webinar is really for all 17 of the industry sectors of essential workers that had to go to work, worried about their families at home. A lot of them got pretty isolated, but we also have the general public, and we also have some pastors and some Rabbi and some faith-based leaders from from mosques.  You know, your thoughts on taking the initiative when we know that we’ve got people in our membership that are hurting?

Lacey Hart:  Yeah. I think, , no matter what religious faith you belong to, taking care of your flock, servitude and being custodians of our blessings are all universal. And I, I do believe covid though, put us in that moral distress because we were in lockdown and not knowing how to connect or not always knowing the right way to connect.  And so I think, I know in our church that actually challenged us quite a bit.  I told you the story, Chuck, of we had prior to covid closed communion. And at that time we really just, we communed with our members. But once we’d been away from each other and we felt that disconnect, we now have open communion in a covid safe, friendly way that we’ve learned.  But it really reminded us that we’re here to care for everybody. Everybody’s at the table regardless of your religious association.

And so I think everybody kind of has kind of come out of that and starting to learn that. But it is hard. What are the ways to connect?  Now near me, we have a Native American population. And so, when he was talking about,  like the,don’t hold back getting into the second one, but also connecting, they will show grief in very visible ways. So, it’s not just crying. They might actually tear their clothes as well and dance or, rituals. And so, during Covid, that was something that they were actually able to maintain, because they didn’t require the close proximity to still display those connections, and that empathy.

Dr. Charles Denham:  Right, right. And I don’t know about you, but I was surprised to find out that when you gave the pre your presentation that the act of, of compassion actually has a healing force on the person manifesting compassion. We’ve got the a moment to cover that because I could tell you that when I went through hurting times, getting to be a cancer doctor and to be grieving with my families or to celebrate with them when, you know, we beat a cancer or we got through a surgery we didn’t think was gonna go well and it did, or waiting on a path report for something that looks suspicious and it was negative, getting to exhibit the compassion.  I loved every day of being a cancer doctor.  And everybody said, oh man, death and dying – but the thing that was phenomenal for me that I just, it just woke me up last, the last couple weeks was the shooting here that Rick Warren talked about, the hero. I’ll probably get choked up, but the hero who was a doctor who put himself between the seniors and took three bullets to save their lives, was my son, Charlie’s doctor who he had an appointment with, is the school doctor for physical examination.  And I was grieving that day and I went, what the heck? I mean, I saw, I’ve seen death and dying forever, but it was when we were working hard to save a life. And that when somebody’s taken like that, even though you’ve seen it forever, it’s different. And it helped me to show compassion to other people to feel better. Can you tell us about that linkage of compassion?

Lacey Hart:  Yeah. So I, the studies that I refer to are from the Mayo Clinic, and it has been MRI studies on the neurobiological response to caregiving. And they focused on those that are in caregiving as a profession. And it is a little bit unfortunate in our society, we refer to caregiving as sort of a soft skill. , and, and we don’t think about it as it’s actually a stress response. And so those in caregiving, it means that they mentally are going into trama or distress instead of fleeing from it.  So, if you think about your flight response, fight or flight, so what they found is those that are in constant mode of caregiving, they’re always in that, go into the stress, which changes the brain chemistry.

Dr. Charles Denham:  And so, we can see that on MRI studies where it fires differently.  And these are functional MRIs, so we’re actually seeing the function going on, not just the structure.

Lacey Hart:  Correct. And so, when you are fatigued from doing that, it shuts down completely. And so, the only way to refire that compassion, which, by the way triggers a dopamine or a high, essentially in the staff.  So that’s, that’s how they feel good is by giving care, because that’s how their brain is wired. So, when you’re stressed fatigued, ,that can shut down, but the only way to re-trigger it is to give compassion again. And so that’s the other interesting thing. It’s, they, you know, if you’re feeling down or we, during,  covid, people got distressed, but then what they did is they isolated. And that’s not actually what your brain needs. Your brain needs you to go back and start giving compassion.  One small, thing and it doesn’t have to be the same thing you’re doing. And our caregivers, it didn’t mean they had to go back and be that nurse at the bedside, but maybe taking a meal to someone in their congregation or in their neighborhood.  I heard of people mowing lawns for others, for those that were sick. Just anything that you are helping another will re-trigger that compassion and start your own healing.

Dr. Charles Denham:  Fantastic. And, and just to remind everybody, those that are not on the podcast, I’m just gonna re-share so we can look at, don’t hold back. Let them see your tears. Address that, Lacey, from your perspective.

Lacey Hart:  I think that’s a, that’s a tough one. And, and especially in the caregiver space.  But in general, we’ve, well, caregivers during covid were called heroes. And they are, but they’re also humans. And so being able to express their humanity, that’s tough for them. But if others can share it, it can bring out that humanity.  Interestingly enough, though, the folks that I think had the really hard time were clergy during this time.

Dr. Charles Denham:  Yes.

Lacey Hart:  Being able to show that they too were human and they too were stressed and distressed. There’s a gentleman who, who actually has a podcast on this, and he was just talking about, I wasn’t trained for this. I was trained in theology. I was trained to bring people to Lord. I wasn’t trained to be human with my human people , and get through things together. And so, it just, that’s the group that struggled most with being human. They, they kind of felt like they had to put a mask on. Those that I think were able to cope and have some humility found they had a community there, and a stronger community by doing so.

Dr. Charles Denham:  And then, and then when we talk about,  Show up and Shut up, it’s kind of a little bit of an abrasive term, I’ve heard or phrase, but I’ve heard Rick Warren teach on this for years and the ministry of presence and the fact that you sometimes you, you don’t need to solve it or tell somebody something. Just that ministry of being present and exhibiting the love of presence address that.

Lacey Hart:  Yeah, I think it is a tough one. And again, I think this is modern day society issue. I don’t think this is something that I, I don’t think they had in the past, , because that’s what you did. And I live near an Amish community. They don’t talk or debate. Someone’s barn burns down. They’re all there rebuilding it. There’s not a discussion of who’s going to do it. There’s not a, you know, should we, shouldn’t we? They’re just there.  And I, when we were talking, when we started the foundation, we were really having some debates about who are we there for? And we’re like, well, we might have a target audience, but we’re really there for everybody. We’re gonna love our neighbor as we love ourselves. And that’s really what it’s about.  And so to show up not to preach, to be there.  I would say part of that show up though, it doesn’t always have to be, you know, maybe it’s show up and do something that they need. Right. You know, it, it might not always have to be that. I know when my father, my father died this last year, and I, I didn’t always need people present, but it meant a lot to me when I saw that the yard was mowed. So, it just, right. Sometimes it can be a presence around me. It doesn’t have to necessarily be physically next to me.

Dr. Charles Denham:  Yeah. Rick mentioned when his son died, that his neighbor took his garbage out and that little touch of love, you know, meant, you know, meant quite a bit, meant quite a bit to him. And I think that, again, not have, not having to have a theological bent of any one religion, just the, just the community being there. It would be the community of your flock, the community of your friend group, your golf group, whatever, just to be, just to be there. Exhibits love is interpreted as love, isn’t it?

Lacey Hart:  Mm-hmm. . Yeah. And we, , we touched up a little bit. You mentioned the Islamic faith, and I was my, that is also in my family. We have,  a Muslim family and my in-laws, and one of the biggest dilemmas that they had during Covid was this moral dilemma of, part of their faith is being together. They pray five times a day, and it’s together. , and then the pilgrimage is part of their, , their religious belief that they need to make a pilgrimage with C O V. All of that stopped. And of course, just like here, their political debates and upset that maybe a government might not allow them to do their pilgrimage. , but what I saw out of that community was this realization that they could make that pilgrimage and they could do that community in other ways. And so just they could be present with each other without doing it in the same fashion. , and, and it’s kind of that reinterpreting what, what’s the true meaning of what the intent of what you’re doing is, , not always the, the behavior or the practice that you’ve always had.

Dr. Charles Denham:  Right. And then,  the fourth,  the fourth area is that Rick addressed was that the tears are temporary. That there is, there is something over the horizon that there, that when he said before, and I’ve heard people say, when you’re going through, hell just keep going and recognize this is not  forever. And I know that you don’t wanna forget it, but you have to be careful about saying that to the person who’s grieving a death, especially,  one from, it might be from an active shooter event or a car accident, or when a young person has been taken abruptly. Your thoughts.

Lacey Hart:  Yeah. I think, I mean, in any grief counseling, that’s something too that trying to take the grief away by saying it’ll go away doesn’t help the individual. But acknowledging and accepting, recognizing, acknowledging that they have the grief is the first step. And that’s really what, that’s that empathy.  But I do think there is a great comfort in knowing that it is temporary. And so that’s where giving that person the permission to actually go through those feelings to actually cry too, okay.  So, I also have a cowboy background, right? So, my dad was a cowboy and cowgirls, don’t cry. Love that one.

Dr. Charles Denham:  Right. . Right, right.

Lacey Hart:   When my dad was dying, he, he did tell me, cowgirls do cry. It’s okay. And, and so you, I needed that permission to feel, because I can’t process through my grief if you don’t feel.  We, need to have those emotions. And so, I think that’s the most validating thing we can do when someone’s in that situation is just recognize and accept the feeling.  But knowing that feeling isn’t going to define you.

Dr. Charles Denham:  Right. Right. This has been wonderful because we are really suffering from a pretty difficult time here with these active shooter events.  I’m gonna add, we have just a few more minutes and we’ll give you a chance to comment at the end. But, what I wanted to do was just let people know, because we’re really, many of us are experiencing a lot of concern over these active shooter events and our Med Tac program, which we started in 2015,  which you see in the upper right hand corner. We had it a little bit earlier in the presentation. I want to just kind of address, since we are having,  these terrible,  these terrible,  you know, terrible events,  you know, with the active shooter events, we’ve had 20 active shooter events since Uvalde.

So this, our approach to bystander rescue care is actually to teach anybody from eight to 80 to tackle these bystander care areas. These are areas where you could save a life before EMS arrives. And, the family huddle checklist is, we put together during this time of covid,  through this Med Tac,  program, and we’ve kind of combined these things together. So, as we go forward and we think about Good Samaritan Care and where we’re, what we’re doing, the, our prior webinars on testing are really pretty timely. They, nothing’s changed that that much. But if we look at this whole area of what can we do for our families that we could actively do, ,  you know, what are they? And so, what I wanna do is, I’m just gonna shift gears for a minute and then come back to you, Lacey, if you have any other comments.

But in the additional information resources section, the additional resources at the end of your, the slide deck, and for those of you on the podcast indulge us, you can go and download them. Our focus on,  on our knowledge management system is called Care University.  And it’s where we build communities of practice. We do course R and D, we, we do competency testing like we did with the 1000 families. And then we create programs. And  a couple of the programs that I think for our families that all of us really need to be aware of is the Stop the Bleed Program, which was developed after Sandy Hook, focused on, use of tourniquets, wound pressure and wound packing, and then also, CPR and use of the automatic defibrillator. So, in 2015, we, we worked with a fellow named Michael Dorn, who helped us understand the major causes of death in our schools and colleges.

And it turned out that these are major co causes of death, cardiac arrest, choking and drowning, opioid overdose, anaphylaxis major trauma with severe bleeding infections. And that’s why we expanded our med tech program. Transportation, accidents. We have more than a hundred,  drive over accidents in driveways and in parking lots in schools. A week, four children die, 60% air parents. And then bullying and bull aside, the, the bullying that occurs, that leads kids to really focus on their, this issue.  So, we’ve written six articles in the Campus Safety magazine. Our seventh will be to address the ICE checklist. It’s called Break the Ice Barrier in Case of Emergency, which addresses,  medical powers of attorney for kids over 18 and seniors. , adjust, setting your phone up to call your ICE numbers, making sure you know where the level one trauma centers are, and then having your medical records available.

Our bystander rescue care program is really focused on these eight areas that I just addressed.  They add up to about 110,000 lives preventable deaths that could be undertaken. And then finally, what we’re doing this summer, and this is the kind of thing that churches can do and that kind of thing, when you talk about the active shooter events, we are putting rescue stations at beaches parks, churches,  and, and highly populated areas with an automatic defibrillator you see on the case. And those that are on the podcast, you can go and look, see them. But automatic defibrillators stop the bleed kits,  911 dedicated phone line. In this case, it’s at a beach. My Son’s Eagle project was a, a rescue surfboard and spine board were added to it. And just in the short period of time,  since that,  Eagle Scout was finished, project was finished, there’ve been,   one confirmed life, save probably a second, and stingray injuries, which in one of our researchers has done the most definitive work on,  in the area of injuries from stingrays.

So, this summer, we’re gonna reconfigure a lot of our work that’s on these longer webinars and podcasts into what we call med tech minutes. In less than 10 minutes, it took, it’s on average, it takes 10 minutes for e m s to arrive.  police, maybe there’re sooner, sometimes not in that 10 minutes, we can show you how to save a life. So, we’re, we’re breaking them down to less than a meal, but more than a bite. And,  teaching it to kids from eight to 80 and, and, and deploying that. So, there are things you could, you know, I Lacey, you know, the issue of these active shooter reds just kind of scares everybody, especially parents with the kids going back to school. And it makes us feel out of control. We’re defenseless. Somebody shows up with Body armor and AR 15, , you know,   you know, a lot of ammunition and our kids are vulnerable, and we don’t know what to do or our families are.

So, we’re gonna be addressing this, like having an emergency word so that if your college, your daughter at college calls and says something and uses a word that we all know is the emergency word you call 911, because she may be, she may be cornered by someone and you don’t know it.  And so there are lots of things families can do to get in control of some of the threats. Not all the threats, but we believe that every kid, we’ve been testing this since since 2015,  third graders to eight to 80 year olds can learn how to use tourniquets wound packing and automatic defibrillator and do c P r. And a kid may not be heavy enough to be able to compress the chest, but we’ve got stories of kids teaching adults what to do. The adult saves a life. So Lacey,  just, you know, this feeling of powerlessness,  that we have when we see these terrible events, there is a lot that families can do, isn’t there? That to be able to feel in control even though that event might not happen and it helps deal with, with the stress. Is that a fair statement? And what would you like to expand on it?

Lacey Hart:   Yeah, we, we talk about, , in our space, and normally we’re talking to professionals, but we say get over the learned helplessness.  There are going to be things out of your control. There are going to be things that feel chaotic, but there is a component. You are in control and preparedness is one of those things. And so definitely, and I would just add a plea to not just the life-saving clinical side, but the mental health component right now. , we have a mental health crisis and we do not have the resources, but we also don’t need all of those resources. There’s coping mechanisms. There’s, there’s things that every person can do to help with mental health. You do not need a professional in that moment to recognize when help is needed. And so I think more of those in the moment, saving and having people trained, , so they feel more comfortable to help in those moments.  I think that’s invaluable.

Dr. Charles Denham:  Fantastic. Well, Lacey, you’ve been terrific.  We will hear from our wonderful voice of the patient, Jeni Dingman.  One thing that we’ll do is, and I’ll be sharing the screen again and we give we’ll give the last word to her. We have no questions in our question section. If anybody has a question for Lacey that you wanna pop in there,  we just, we have a couple minutes left, but I’m gonna share the screen here and,  we’ll be wrapping up. So, my favorite Bible verse actually is fight the good fight, finish the race, and keep the faith.  And this is from Apostle Paul. And it really you know, this speaks to me as I’m sure there are phrases verses stories that speak to your Muslim cousins or family members, Lacey and our Jewish friends. And the story of Job is used frequently in the Jewish culture.  No matter what our faith, everyone is a patient and everyone can be a caregiver. And I think you’ve made a really nice,   given us a nice example of why, you know, the compassion. I just am so thrilled to learn what you taught us about compassion. So, what we’ll do right now is, is that – we’ll hear from from Jeni Dingman and allow her to close us.  So Jeni, we’ll give you the last word. Thank you for closing us today.

Jennifer Dingman:  Thank you for having me. What a great webinar. I just want everyone to know how much Rick Warren’s message of healing and helping others heal meant to me. And I’m hoping it inspired all of you as much as it inspired me. Please invite your families and friends and colleagues to listen to the recording, and we’re looking forward to seeing everyone back with your friends and family and colleagues next month. God bless and thank you for being here.

Dr. Charles Denham:  Thank you, Jeni.  We’re, we’re so grateful to you Lacey, for spending your time with us again. And,  we will see everyone,  next month. Anything else you’d like to add, Lacey?

Lacey Hart:   No. Thank you so much for this opportunity, Chuck. Appreciate it. Very timely.

Dr. Charles Denham:  Alright, well, God bless and information will be posted. The transcript of Rick Warren’s sermon is posted and information regarding Stop the Bleed and the courses that may be taken. We really believe that families can take a little bit of control of their fear by knowing what to do if something were to happen, knowing that it’s a low probability, but that it could.  So, take care and God bless all of you.