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2022 Speaker Profile
Beth Lown, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Beth Lown has been interested in empathy, compassion, collaboration, and relational and communication skills since beginning medical school four decades ago. This interest has deepened over her many years of clinical practice and as a health professional educator and researcher. She has been an active participant in many national organizations dedicated to improving these attributes and skills.
She is the chief medical officer of the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare, a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening the relationships among patients, families, and clinicians and advancing compassionate health care. In this role, she develops and implements programs, curricula, and research. She speaks locally, nationally, and internationally about empathy, compassion, and communication, and teaches these attributes and skills to health professionals across the continuum of learning.
She has also served as president and board member of the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare. This service included organizing collaborative relationships and conferences with the European Academy on Communication in Healthcare. She has served on several test materials development and standard-setting committees, task forces, and consulting teams for Clinical/Communication Skills for the National Board of Medical Examiners and the United States Medical Licensing Examination (Step 2 of the USMLE).
Dr. Lown is associate professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, and director of Faculty Development at Mount Auburn Hospital, Cambridge, MA. She has co-led several fellowships in medical education for faculty within the Harvard Medical School system and is the director of the only longitudinal interprofessional fellowship in health professional education in the Harvard Medical School system.
Monday | 4:00 PM -5:00 PM
Beyond Resilience: Taking Action to Heal Healthcare
The current healthcare environment is making it increasingly difficult to remain committed to our sense of calling as healthcare professionals. Thousands are leaving their professions, and that might be the most self-compassionate thing to do for many. While we can advocate for systemic change of the healthcare system, what kinds of change can we implement at the organizational level, not just to support our innate resilience, but to promote our collective compassion and the sense of reward and purpose that compassion engenders?
In this interactive session, we’ll envision such organizations and discuss how to implement an actionable framework to promote organization-wide compassion at all levels from leadership to the workforce and ultimately for patients and their families.
Describe 6 key principles that can be implemented to create compassionate organizational cultures that support our innate resilience and promote organizations that are compassionate, equitable, safe, and effective
Use appreciative inquiry to collectively envision an organization that embodies these principles and describe concrete steps to actualize them
Articulate actions they can take to lead change that supports their own, and their coworkers’ collective wellbeing