Dare to Be Ready with Dr. Chris Roussin, founder of CMS-ALPS, the Center for Medical Simulation’s team and organization readiness consulting service. In this podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and in video form on Youtube, Chris will meet with a series of guests with specific readiness challenges in their healthcare teams. Each week we will approach the challenge of how to get teams ready for the difficult work they face every day, and work through how we can get our people and teams ready to face that challenge. Join us monthly and Dare to Be Ready!

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Episode 1: Ready to Help “Safe” Patients with Diabetes in the ER

Dr. Marie McDonnell is an Endocrinologist and Director of Diabetes at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, joins us to discuss her team’s readiness challenges around training with the Emergency Room to connect triaged emergency care with diabetes specialty care.

Readiness Challenges: The care teams in the Emergency Room are ready and skilled in treating patients with diabetes who come in very sick and need to be admitted to the hospital. However, the Emergency Room also experiences a very high volume of diabetes recidivism, patients with diabetes who are stabilized and able to be discharged but then return later with the same issue presenting again. This is compounded by the fact that 50% of diabetes patients in the ER arrive between 5 PM and 9 AM because they could not contact their normal endocrinology care teams.

Today we work on a readiness plan to help ER teams better connect into the big system of diabetes care within the hospital so that patients who are “safe” get connected with specialists who can solve the underlying diabetes self-care issues that brought them to the ER, so that they don’t end up back in the ER later that day.

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Host & Co-Producer: Chris Roussin, PhD, Senior Director, CMS-ALPS (https://harvardmedsim.org/chris-roussin/)

Producer: James Lipshaw, MFA, EdM, Assistant Director, Media (https://harvardmedsim.org/james-lipshaw/)

Consulting and readiness with CMS-ALPS: https://harvardmedsim.org/alps-applied-learning-for-performance-and-safety

Dare to Be Ready on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Dare to Be Ready on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Laura Rock, Janice Palaganas and Jenny explore where they are currently struggling in their practice of sharing their point of view clearly and then really inviting the other person’s perspective. How does this go when your identity is more provisional, and you feel like to have to establish yourself and insert your point of view to be ‘strong’?

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Today we’re talking about transforming toxic culture, whether on your floor, in your unit, or in your department. How do we change unit culture via point of care conversations? You can teach people all the speaking skills in the world, but if they don’t care about the other people in the room or don’t think there’s a possibility they aren’t perfectly right, it won’t take. This topic was featured in a keynote of the same name by our colleague Laura Rock at SESAM2025 this summer.

Workout of the week: Share your point of view, and follow it with a genuine, open inquiry into the other person’s perspective.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/

Janice Palaganas and Laura Rock rejoin us to talk about their experiences of moving from mental rehearsal to actually asking the group, “What am I missing?” We explore what are the things we do or struggle with in terms of point of care conversations?

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

This week on Curious Now, bring home the heart of this summer's work on internal resets, thought bystanding, communication, and teamwork. Our workout of the week is a simple one: go from mental rehearsal to actual practice.

In previous weeks we asked ourselves, and this week ask the group:

• “Who sees this differently?”

• “What am I not noticing?”

Learn more and get coaching from Jenny Rudolph at at www.harvardmedsim.org.

Coming soon on the CMS Podcast channel-- The "Dare to Be Ready" podcast with Chris Roussin! Join us and a series of rotating guests as we examine readiness challenges across a broad swath of healthcare settings, and work with experts to solve their team problems in real time.

Our first episodes include getting Boston Emergency Room teams ready to handle diabetic patients who are "safe" to be discharged but likely to end up back in the ER without additional support, getting surgical teams at a peripheral hospital in Switzerland ready to declare a crisis and prepare to transport a patient they don't have the resources to care for, and much more!

Dare to Be Ready will premiere in September, so keep your ears open! Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Youtube.

On this week’s Curious Now Listeners, Jenny, Laura Rock, and Janice Palaganas each share a recent time that they’ve struggled to be transparent with their own thinking as they rejoin us to discuss their experience with last week’s workout of sharing one vulnerable point of view in a conversation to try to work towards a collaborative inquiry rather than mystery and defensiveness.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

In decades of faculty and clinician training at the Center for Medical Simulation, we’ve identified one element of our approach to Good Judgment learning conversations that people have the most difficulty with. This obstacle can take what should be an insightful, curious inquiry and leave it with a defensive or confused learner. Similar effects happen in negotiations at point of care and feedback conversations. The greatest obstacle is this: clearly and transparently sharing what you think about the situation. There are many reasons why we struggle with this, from thinking that if we share what we believe, it will be too harsh or too threatening for the other person, to believing that sharing our point of view will be used against us and that it would be safer to try to unilaterally steer the discussion without it. In this week’s workout, you’ll be challenged to try sharing your underlying point of view in a situation where that feels vulnerable to you.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Janice Palaganas and Laura Rock join us for our first Listeners episode of this new chapter! This week we are discussing how the mental rehearsal of asking “What am I missing?” worked out for them in situations where they were very sure that they were right.

Emerging again is a theme where our listeners find that they experience the work of checking their emotions and getting curious very different in professional settings where they are working in a certain mode versus how they conduct themselves in ‘default mode’ in their personal life.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Join us for our third chapter of Curious Now, as we talk about words and mindsets that can transform toxic culture!

Becoming skeptical of your own thoughts and beliefs, bystanding your own perception of events so that you can ask with curiosity: “What am I missing here?” We’re setting the stage for our third chapter of Curious Now, looking at how we can skillfully lead teams and scale up our good judgment approach to not just ourselves but the people around us.

We’ve talked previously about becoming aware of our own reactive judgments and perceiving them as thoughts rather than reality. But what we mean here is a more challenging exercise: can we bystand not just what we might call ‘System 1’ thoughts, which are easy to understand as hot or instinctive reactions, but also our ‘System 2’ thoughts which are cooler, more considered and, at least to us, rational?

• Get coaching from Jenny Rudolph at www.harvardmedsim.org

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822