Notes from Neil

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  We all know this Thanksgiving will be different for all of us but one thing stays the same - gratitude for each other and the work we do together. I am thankful for your resilience this year and how you have advanced health through research DESPITE the challenges we all face. 

Please continue to stay vigilant, safe and care for one another through the holidays. I want to share my video message to MedStar Health Research Institute associates with you too, and to encourage you to take care of yourself and use the resources available at www.medstarhealth.org/wellbeing. You can view the video message here or by clicking on the image below.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving and please take a moment to rest.

I would like to share with you a recent interview I did with Samip Sheth, a Georgetown School of Medicine student for the American College of Cardiology (ACC). In this interview, I take time to reflect on my training, career arc and the field of cardiovascular medicine. You may Read The Interview Here featured in the student section of the American College of Cardiology to give advice to medical students. Thank You Samip for the opportunity to share!

Each summer, MedStar Health and Georgetown University collaborate to provide rising second-year medical students the opportunity to participate in research. This summer was unprecedented, to say the least, but fortunately, due to the adaptability of the students and mentors, more than 90 students participated in research via a virtual format. This is another example of our continued resilience despite the difficulties we have faced in 2020 to date. 

To culminate this summer’s work, the students presented at the very first virtual MedStar-Georgetown Summer Research Capstone with a little over 200 attendees. The first hour of the evening included remarks from the directors of the four summer research programs, a presentation from one of the former scholars and a Sarah Stewart Lecture by Dr. Rachel Scott, entitled HIV & Women: disparities in health outcomes & representation in research. 

For those who may be interested, you can view the recordings using the links below.

Plenary Session Recording

Student Presentation Recordings

Congratulations to all our students and a big thank you to all of the mentors and moderators!

Below is my monthly message for the November 2020 edition of the MHRI newsletter, Focus. You can view Focus online at MedStarResearch.org/FOCUS.

• The 9th month of a historic pandemic superimposed on the start of the flu season and rising COVID19 infections and deaths across the nation
• Two days before a historic election with concerns that, no matter the election results, there could be wide-scale protests
• The midst of a financial crisis with the worse week of the stock market since the pandemic began
• The continued, relentless, appalling acts of racial injustice across the nation, with the killing of Walter Wallace Jr. in Philadelphia last week

Taken together, it easily feels overwhelming. All of us want to use the upcoming holiday season to escape to the past where we travel and laugh with friends and family but for most of us, that just won’t be the case. All of the challenges of today will likely be with us for the foreseeable future. And it is for this reason that at the end of last week’s system COVID19 call, Dr. Evans shared a message on resilience, which is so important to us all.

A recent article from the Harvard Business Review, “What Really Makes Us Resilient?”, conducted a global study to better understand resilience and how to develop more of it. They found resilience is a state of mind created by being exposed to suffering and tangible threats. This strongly suggests that we discover our resilience only when “we are forced to meet unavoidable suffering full in the face.” The authors go on to show how these findings can be used to help us all create greater resilience in ourselves: 

1. 
   Accept the realities around us. Don’t rush back to normal to assuage our fears but rather face the real-world changes we will have to make to protect ourselves.
2. Trust ourselves to figure out how to live happily inside this new normal – we have an uncanny ability to improvise and adapt, so use it.
3. Our resilience is built upon our strongly held values, our deep conviction and our meaning, purpose and self-efficacy of our lives.

This is the time in our lives we all need resilience. I have been part of MedStar Health for over 20 years and am so proud of how we have built upon the work of the last decade to build new multi-disciplinary teams, improvise and be creative to stand up new functions, be resourceful in an unprecedented way, pull upon our deep-seated moral convictions and, in turn, help each other become more resilient. We are helping each other, as we take care of our community today and advance their health for tomorrow. Even our annual Power to Heal campaign is focusing on helping each other this year. It’s how we treat people and each other. It’s how we build resilience ourselves and together. It’s how we stay healthy and how we survive and thrive through adversity. It is the essence of advancing our health and those around us.

Read Focus online at MedStarResearch.org/FOCUS.