SAEM PULSE | NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2021
WELLNESS
48
A Picture of a Smiling Face: Humanizing Front Line Workers During the Pandemic By Mia Karamatsu, MD; Al’ai Alvarez, MD; Anya Waterstone, MD; Danielle McTaggart; and Nancy Ewen Wang, MD on behalf of the SAEM Wellness Committee As we enter the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing masks and personal protective equipment (PPE) has become second nature to all of us. While the masks, gowns, and goggles serve to protect us, they also make patient interactions less personal and somewhat disconnected. At Stanford Emergency Medicine (EM), we implemented an intervention
focused on humanizing the experience between front line workers and our patients. We wanted to explore the effects of wearing a “smiling” selfportrait on staff well-being and patientstaff interactions. The project originated from Mary Beth Heffernan’s Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Portrait Project. During the Ebola crisis in Africa in 2014, Mary
Beth Heffernan recognized the value of seeing the face of health care providers and called her project “PPE Portraits.” Health care workers, donned in PPE from head to toe, wore large portraits of their smiling faces while caring for their patients. This provided a human connection and improved the patient (and provider) experience. Based on Mary Beth Heffernan’s work, Dr. Cati Brown-Johnson used PPE Portraits at
