The Post-It Note Version
sharing the impact of a community-based grief intervention through a compelling video that was shared with hospitals across the nation.
Project Partners // Anya Zimmerman-Smith, Rosemary Rossi MSW
Project Timeline // Spring 2021
Key Insights
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Emotional Walls
Healthcare workers feel a need to put up a protective wall between themselves and their patients.
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Lack of Training
Oncologists are trained on how to deal with loss from a patient perspective, but not a personal perspective.
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Grieving Alone
Healthcare workers feel a pressure to grieve alone.
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"Built for this" Mentality
Healthcare workers believe that some people are built for work in oncology, and others aren’t.
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Professionalism
Expressing emotions or becoming connected to patients and families comes across as a lack of professionalism.
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Burnout
Expression emotions and grief feels like it will lead to compassion fatigue and burnout.
The Process
In partnership with Rosemary Rossi, MSW of the UCSF Brain Tumor Center, we set out with the goal to capture and communicate The Honor Project’s meaning, importance, and impact in order to share it with other healthcare teams.
We started by interviewing staff at UCSF about their experience with The Honor Project, and categorized the impact of The Honor Project as follows:
Combats Stereotypes
Cultivates Empathy
Builds Resilience
Honors Patients
Acknowledges Humanity
Prevents Burnout
Establishes Community
Even though this remarkable practice existed, we were curious why this program hadn't been adopted elsewhere.
This led us to identify the following barriers to adoption.
Time constraints
Stigma around emotions
"Built for this" mentality
Equating patient death with failure
Prioritizing patient care before self care
Through Rosemary’s suggestion, we believed the most compelling way to tell this story was through a video. It was important in this video was succinct, and personal.
The video went through several iterations, each one incorporating subtle, yet meaningful changes.
We wanted the video to have a few key components:
The first is that we wanted the video to be centered around the perspective of a neuro-oncologist. Our target audience for this video was neuro-oncologists at different hospitals across the nation, so we wanted the story to be one that resonated with them. By telling this in a narrative format, we hoped that our audience would empathize with Emily, or perhaps even see themselves in her.
Secondly, we wanted the concept of The Honor Project to be introduced by the chief, as we found that the chief can often be the one setting the tone around how the community processes grief.
And finally, perhaps the biggest challenge we faced in creating this video was addressing the skepticism about The Honor Project. We wanted to strike a balance between effectively communicating the impact of having a place and a community for emotional support, while still empathizing with the neuro-oncologists potential skepticism.
The video was shared
with
hospitals across the nation.
