Bill Klaproth (Host): This is a special episode of Today in Nursing Leadership, a podcast from the American Organization for Nursing Leadership, recorded live at the AONL conference. I'm Bill Klaproth. As we talk about a very interesting session, Researching The Healing Power of Storytelling in Nursing.

With me is Jennifer Graham, Chief Nurse Executive at MultiCare Deaconess and Valley Hospital. We also have Linda Alderson, Chief Nurse Executive at MultiCare Tacoma General and Allenmore Hospitals. And we have Heather Coleman, System Vice President of Clinical and Professional Practice at MultiCare Health System and CNE at MultiCare Auburn Hospital and MultiCare Covington Hospital. I want to welcome you all to the podcast booth. Heather, welcome.

Heather Coleman, MSN, RN: Welcome to you too. Thanks for having us.

Host: Of course, this is going to be fun. And Jennifer, welcome.

Jennifer Graham: Hi Bill, thanks for having us. It's always exciting.

Host: You bet. Yeah, absolutely. And Linda.

Linda Alderson, MSN, RN. NEC-BC: Hi Bill. It's great to have you have us here.

Bill Klaproth (Host): I am glad to have you here. And as we've always already established, it's always Linda. So if something goes wrong on this podcast, it's always Linda.

Okay, just want to get that right out front at the beginning of the podcast. So Heather, tell us about this storytelling in nursing. What is this and why did you decide to address this and bring this session here to AONL 2024?

Heather Coleman, MSN, RN: Thank you for that question. The reason why our organization started on this pathway was really our feeling as we talked with our nursing leaders, our nursing frontline staff and how traumatized they have been, they were during the pandemic. And so, some of us nurse leader went to this thing called the Moth in Seattle, Washington, where these individuals got on stage and they told stories of their lives and things that had happened with them.

And we thought, Huh, this might be something for nursing and what we could do possibly through research of seeing if nurses were coming to tell a story and telling their experiences if they could start to heal from the trauma that they had during the pandemic. And so for us, that was the reason why we started on this journey.

It was really working to build resilience, but it was more than resilience. It was to start healing that trauma the nurses had experienced.

Host: So these are nurses telling their own stories of the trauma they dealt with in the pandemic, is that right?

Heather Coleman, MSN, RN: That was our initial thought behind it, and it has grown and expanded beyond that. It really has been around we have found through the traumas, through nursing practice, throughout the pandemic, but also through their lives. And so we've heard stories of nurses who had traumatic births or had traumatic personal stories that had happened to them.

And then as well as in their nursing practice during the pandemic. So we were very surprised to start to hear about the holistic approach that the storytelling gave for that healing for the nurses as human beings, not just nurses. And so, for us it was a beautiful side effect, to say, of the program and the event.

Host: Well, thank you. And Jennifer, how did you get this started? How did you get these stories and get them, how does this work?

Jennifer Graham: How does this work? Yeah, so we were really fortunate that in our health system, our providers, our physicians were already doing this practice. And so we had a little inspiration and we had some structure already built that we could build upon. So if someone were going to start from scratch, it's really about building excitement at the grassroots level around how we tell stories.

So we individually reached out to people we knew had compelling narratives to tell. As leaders I think often we're sort of painted with this broad brush of being separate from the experiences of people that we lead, but in the reality we actually are witnesses to a lot of their suffering. So our ability to be with them I think it's a really important leadership skill.

So we knew their stories and we knew who had a really compelling narrative to share and we encouraged them to share that with us and then we developed an event around that. So it was, we want to hear your story, we want to coach you on how to tell your story. Nurses tend to be clinicians because we are.

So we want to tell the story with blood pressure levels and right, we gave them these drugs and we tried this thing which really depersonalizes what's happening because we're talking about the experience of someone else's body. And so when we tell stories, how do we coach people into telling their own narrative about how they were impacted by what happened?

Host: And their feelings.

Jennifer Graham: And their feelings and their processes and how they managed grief and trauma and all the other things that happen often as a result of these really life changing things that we witness.

So we created the structure. We held an event. So we found the nurses, we convinced them to be courageous, We held an event and invited others to come and hear their stories, including their family members and other people who were impacted. We, we served delicious food and alcoholic beverages and made it a, you know, an evening where we came together to do something that wasn't clinical, but had strong clinical impact. And then we just sat back and let them tell their stories and there wasn't a dry eye in the house. Yeah.

Host: I was going to ask, I was thinking, this on video? Is this a podcast? Are people writing it? But this was a live event.

Jennifer Graham: It's a live event. As we've gotten more sophisticated, we've been able to stream it to one another. Yep. Yep. So we use old, good old fashioned Microsoft Teams. Um, and we can stream to one another. But the best impact is when we come together and sit in a room and share with one another. And so the live events are much more impactful, I think, than the technology that we use. Although I'm a big fan of technology.

Host: Yeah. I can see that. So, Linda, you all work for MultiCare. Different divisions, if you will, right? Different locations. Did you bring everybody together then? Linda, how did you, like, we're all meeting at this one place on this night. Is that how it worked?

Linda Alderson, MSN, RN. NEC-BC: So when we first initated our first event, we did. We everybody together. We brought folks over from the inland northwest side which is on the eastside of Washington State onto the west side, and brought everyone together for this event that Jennifer described. We have evolved now, especially as our organization has gotten larger, and we are actually doing events on each side of the state, as Jennifer talked about, and streaming those events.

We've even evolved to get into more comfortable settings. Our very first event was in one of our education classrooms. It was beautiful, but it was in a classroom. And we've evolved into going to nice small, cozy spaces in our communities almost like, little lounges or clubs and allowing folks to get comfortable, allowing them to be in community together and listening to these stories, bringing our technology so that we can stream across all of our different regions as we share together the experiences of our nursing teams.

Host: I love this. I think this is so cool. So, Linda, let me stay with you. For someone that wants to start this, what are the, or, thinks, gosh, that's a really good idea. I want to do this at my own health care system. Are there first steps to take?

Linda Alderson, MSN, RN. NEC-BC: Well, I would say yes. I would say a lot of what brought about this idea was as Heather talked about seeing that example. But we had spent in 2022 about three to four months doing listening sessions across our entire organization. And our goal in those listening sessions, we did 52 sessions, talked with about a thousand nurses, and we really just wanted to hear their lived experience and understand what they had been through so we would know where to go next

in our wellness and resilience work with them. And so I would highly recommend you think about using a forum, like a listening session, because that's where you're going to find your first stories. People are not going to raise their hand and immediately come out of the woodwork when you start advertising for a storytelling event.

But you will find those stories in the listening sessions. And then you get, then you need to work side by side with these folks as Jennifer talked about. Bring them along, help them to see that this can be their healing for them. And once you get those first five, ten, fifteen storytellers, and you get this out there, and you look at ways you can market across your organization and tie it to whatever you're trying to do

with your nursing enterprise and any wellness or resilience journeys; then you can start to get a little bit of momentum, whether you pull it into your shared leadership teams, whether you pull it into other intact groups, and you start to look for folks that are interested in telling their stories. You find a debriefing and you ask that nurse if they're willing to tell their story after the debriefing. So, there's lots of ways for you to start looking for the stories, and then once you have folks that are interested, then what you need is somebody that can coach them along, to Jennifer's

Jennifer Graham: I think that's really important. Yeah, we are fortunate we have three coaches in our health system who can help our nurses hone those stories and tell them in a way that has the most impact. And by coaching them, they also process the story and process the information and they are transformed by the activity of building that story and then overcoming their fear and standing in front of a group of people where they are very vulnerable to share that with their peers, an experience that they've had.

There is a lot of tears, and a lot of emotion that come out in that process, but through that coaching, they're transformed.

Linda Alderson, MSN, RN. NEC-BC: Yeah, absolutely.

Heather Coleman, MSN, RN: And I want to add to the coaching here, it's so important if, any nursing leader is going to start this journey, to have coaches who really understand this psycho this psychology around trauma and being very sensitive to that because as we've gone on this journey, we've found deeper traumas for these nursing teams and although we're nurses, those coaches need to be really thoughtful on that coaching process through the stories, so.

Host: Cause you could trigger somebody bad.

Heather Coleman, MSN, RN: Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Host: Memories kind of trauma comes back. Well, this is fascinating, 52 sessions, a thousand nurses. So that's kind of where you all started to gather these stories then. This is amazing. So I have so many questions, so little time. Jennifer then so key takeaways for a nurse leader thinking about doing this.

Jennifer Graham: The coaching piece is really important. So someone in your organization who has the skills to help people tell their stories or finding a consultant who can help you do that so that we're not retraumatizing people. That nurses have stories to tell that are amazing and human and transformative for all of us to hear.

I think nurses are the type of people who think we just put our heads down and get our work done and that people probably aren't interested in what we have to say or what we do and nothing could be further from the truth. I think nursing has the power to change the world. And so, we want to ensure that every nurse feels like they have a voice.

And that we create something that is sustainable, because once it catches on fire and people want to be a part of it, people don't want it to go away. And so, how are you going to build something that everybody can rely on in the future, and that when people want to have an opportunity to tell their story, that we have a venue to do that.

Linda Alderson, MSN, RN. NEC-BC: The other thing I would add is for nurse leaders that wanna start this work is to be courageous and stick with it. It is hard at first to find people that are willing to come forward and share their stories, and it's hard to sustain that ongoing until you get the flywheel spinning. So don't be discouraged if you are not getting the excitement that you would think you would get out of something like this. It takes time for the organization or your nursing department or whatever area you want to try this in. It takes time for that to evolve to a point where people feel comfortable being able to tell a story that then moves somebody else and helps somebody else potentially seek out a healing story themselves. So.

Host: So it sounds like one of the challenges is actually getting them to Oh tell their story.

Jennifer Graham: Oh yeah.

Linda Alderson, MSN, RN. NEC-BC: Yeah, yeah.

Heather Coleman, MSN, RN: It is. I think that was at the very beginning. Now we have a waiting list and so, what Linda is sharing with be patient and know that stor it's not long stories. These could be a song that a, clinician or a nurse has written. This could be a poem. This could be, we had a rap. We had along with the traditional story that you would think in a storytelling event. So, think outside the box. If you're, if you have people who might want to do something different. And,

Jennifer Graham: Yeah, the creativity is really inspiring.

Host: So tell us about the results of this. I would imagine it's cathartic the person telling the story, but for the people listening, they must feel like, hey, I'm not alone. So tell us about the results that you've seen so far, Heather.

Heather Coleman, MSN, RN: So we're actually doing a qualitative study and we've gone back to those individuals who have told their stories along the way and what we're finding is that nurses are reporting that they feel more connected to others, that they've achieved and feel more personal strength, that they are finding new possibilities in life and overall have a greater appreciation for life.

And so when you think about nurses who are traumatized and have been traumatized and have very low energy since the pandemic; hearing that re energized feeling towards who they are as an individual and who they are as a nurse, it's been very inspiring to hear those positive results that we're starting to get.

Jennifer Graham: They remember why they became a nurse, right? They remember that they had a purpose, that they wanted to serve others, that they wanted to feel connected to something larger than themselves, and it's easy to forget that when you're so mired in the challenges of being a day in day out clinician.

Host: Yeah. Linda, your thoughts?

Linda Alderson, MSN, RN. NEC-BC: Yeah, echo what both of them no pun intended, girls. It's called ECHOs, Nursing ECHOs. I would echo that as well. And I, think what I've been able to see I've had the opportunity to have quite a few of my nurses tell their stories. And what I've been able to see is that their connection back into the work is so different than where they had been.

Many of the nurses that have presented have worked in critical care units. And went through really traumatic times during the pandemic and some of the decisions that we all had to make. And they have been able to describe what it's like to feel like they are connected back into the work. And in a way that actually makes them feel valued again. So, I think it's been great.

Host: Yeah. Well, this has been fascinating. Thank you for sharing your stories and what your session is about. I'd like to wrap up with each of your own recollections or what this has meant to you hearing these stories personally. I know why you're doing this for the people that work for you. But I'd like to hear what it's meant to each of you personally, hearing these stories. Heather, let me start with you.

Heather Coleman, MSN, RN: That's such a great question cause it, it just got to me and put tears in my eyes. It really has connected me back with my nursing practice as a nursing leader and why I became a nursing leader. So, it's very powerful to hear the extraordinary things these nurses go through.

Host: Yeah. Thank you. Jennifer.

Jennifer Graham: I'm always inspired by vulnerability. It's not celebrated enough in our culture. And so when I go to these events and I listen to people open their hearts and embrace the love of other people and find some love for themselves and some forgiveness for themselves; I can't help but feel inspired to be a better leader for them, to make a place that they love to work and practice, where they feel supported and engaged. And ultimately, right, all of us have a purpose as a human being, and I think this helps remind me of my purpose and hopefully remind them of their purpose too.

Host: Thank you for that. Linda, how about you?

Linda Alderson, MSN, RN. NEC-BC: For me, it is really about creating that environment where a nurse can feel like they can do their best work. And if this is a avenue, when I listen to these stories, to me, I see an avenue for them to feel like they have purpose and meaning. And that just brings out so much joy in my heart. And so when I listen to this, it's about being that servant leader and helping them to get to a place where they can do their best, most meaningful work.

You get

Host: I love it. You guys are making me cry here. Jeez. Good Lord. You three. My goodness. It just goes to show you the power of just listening to another human being, right?

Jennifer Graham: Yeah.

Host: I'm getting emotional while I'm talking to you three. My gosh, get it together, Bill. What's wrong with you? want to thank all of you for your time today. This is great. Heather, thank you for your time.

Heather Coleman, MSN, RN: Welcome.

Host: Jennifer, thank you.

Jennifer Graham: My pleasure.

Host: Linda, thank you so much.

Host: Thank you for having us.

Wow. This has been great. Thank you for sharing your stories. This has been awesome. Once again, Jennifer Graham, Linda Alderson, and Heather Coleman. And for more information, please visit aonl.org. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels. And check out full podcast library for topics of interest to you. This is Today in Nursing Leadership. Thanks for listening.