Stress and Its Relationship to Leadership and a Healthy Workplace Culture

Every organization needs to be driven by effective leaders. In higher education, many leadership courses are designed to transfer knowledge and critical thinking. Other professional development workshops, seminars, and conferences in leadership also offer leadership training and development to assist individuals to understand human capital, and create an organization free from toxicity. A toxic working environment can lead to low morale, disruption in productivity and motivation, high rate of absenteeism, individuals using sick days when they are not sick, cause emotional and physical health issues, and even submitting derailed projects beyond deadlines. When there is an upsurge of stress in the workplace within employees and administrators, the organization will struggle. Negative information dynamics affect health and contribute to stress. Stress management capacity is the ability to manage stress and is vital in the prevention of a negative impact of stress. Stress management can be improved for leaders and organizations.

Preparing Future Physicians to Adapt to the Changing Health Care System

One vital goal of medical education is to promote the development of desirable professional qualities among future physicians, such as compassion, empathy, and humanism. Future physicians must finish their training prepared to meet the changing health needs of society, yet in reality many students graduate from medical school more cynical and less empathetic than when they began. During clinical clerkships, many students experience an “ethical erosion” as they transition in to real world clinical settings. Through innovative longitudinal integrated curricular designs focusing on continuity, medical students participate in the comprehensive care of patients over time and have continuous ongoing learning relationships with the responsible clinicians. As patients place increasing importance on the doctor-patient relationship, learning models that foster stronger connections between medical students and their patients, as well as with their teachers and communities, are needed in order to better prepare the next generation of physicians to serve a changing health care system.

Humane Education

The relationship between human and canine has long been a topic of interest, studied by many. It can be argued that the effect of a canine on their human is one of life's greatest and most impactful. Humane education recognizes this relationship and those of other animals in humans' lives. Humane education provides students with the background information necessary to properly treat animals, while simultaneously instilling a multitude of desired character traits that young people carry far into adult hood. During the 2014 and 2015 school year, an elementary school in The School District of Palm Beach County, Florida began implementing humane education in the classroom, as part of their environmental Green and School-wide Positive Behavior Support initiatives. Humane education curriculum implementation included visits from local author and President of The Little Blue Dog, a non-profit organization with humane treatment of animals at its core. A field trip to a Peggy Adams, a local, no-kill animal rescue was also provided for students in Grades 3rd and 4th, where students toured the facility and wrote haiku poetry about the pets that were up for adoption. Classrooms in Grades Pre-K through 5th were consistently exposed to topics and content pertaining to the proper care and treatment of animals, including critical character traits such as respect, empathy, responsibility, and kindness. As a result of the implementation of the humane education integration, the elementary school's student body further developed a culture in which the fore mentioned character traits (among others) were admired and adopted, creating a school environment in which respect and kindness were the expectation, and responsibility, a necessary must.

Framework of Indian Healthcare System and its Challenges

India, one of the oldest civilizations and second most populous country is ethnically, linguistically, geographically, religious, and demographically diverse is poorly ranked due to complex public healthcare system, which suffers from insufficient funding, poor management. Poor health intertwined with poverty, affordability, accessibility, burden of infectious and non-communicable affecting lives of most Indians. Healthcare ecosystems are complex and still evolving, investments in service delivery system, infrastructure, and technology, are still being experimented and explored. India's booming population; increasing purchasing power; rising awareness of personal health and hygiene; and significant growth in infectious, chronic degenerative, and lifestyle diseases are driving the growing market. In this chapter we will explore accessible and affordable healthcare system, state of public healthcare, healthcare reforms, governance (Constitutional Provisions, Law, and Policy framework) in healthcare delivery, and Opportunity offered by market drivers.

Culture of Learning Cities

This chapter contributes a conceptual framework for addressing the health of communities through the synergy of leisure, public health, and continuing education systems at a localized city level. The culture learning cities offers a broader setting and case for implementing solutions that increase the overall health of communities. Key built environments within learning cities, such as parks, can serve as nontraditional continuing education structures, where people can learn and share their differences and experiences that continually improve qualities of the individual, community, and society.

Synergism through Therapeutic Visual Arts

Oncology patients experience significant psychological distress in addition to physical symptoms associated with illness. Overwhelming emotions, negative moods, and other forms of psychological stressors are present due to uncertain future. Shock experienced after receiving diagnosis, distress associated with medical decision-making, lack of control over one's environment, and fears related to changes in lifestyle within the course of the illness are a few examples of the challenges faced by patients. Art therapy is a therapeutic treatment modality that accommodates the opportunity for patients to make autonomous decisions, organize and structure these choices, and obtain a sense of control over personal artwork as well as the therapeutic experience. In this paper, the authors explore the literature surrounding the impact of perceived control on psychological distress in oncology patients, the connection between decision-making and perceived control, and the potential for art therapy to increase perceived control through decision-making opportunities for oncology patients.

The Role of Self-Efficacy and Aging in Managing Disease

In 1900, life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years and infectious diseases were the leading cause of mortality; today, life expectancy in the U.S. is almost 80 years and chronic diseases are the leading causes of mortality. Eighty percent of adults 65 and older have multiple chronic health conditions, which are costly to treat. Offering older adults an evidence-based self-management program can reduce medical costs and improve patient outcomes and quality of life. Research has shown that self-efficacy is a key factor in effective self-management programs. The Chronic Disease Self-Management Program (CDSMP) is an evidence-based program that helps patients to boost their self-efficacy and improve their disease self-management, under the supervision of a physician. In addition, the use of evidence-based complementary modalities is recommended as part of an integrative approach to self-management to help patients manage the daily anger, fear, and depression that frequently accompany living with an incurable disease.

A Need for Greater Collaboration

Patient safety concerns have risen to such levels that multiple organizations and initiatives have been created to reduce hospital readmissions and medication errors in the United States healthcare system. Interprofessional education and collaborative practice (IPECP) has become a center of focus in healthcare education and the competency-based programs help health providers function more effectively as a team, train new university and college healthcare students to become ready for collaborative practice, and assist in making new policies and practices to improve today's healthcare system. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of healthcare initiatives created to help lower hospital readmission rates and polypharmacy errors. These projects, programs, and initiatives optimize patient care while minimizing costs. With pharmacists, physicians, nurses, social workers, and other professionals and caregivers build better teams with improved communication and understanding each other's roles and responsibilities, the global healthcare system will overcome the numerous challenges.

Writing Healing Narratives

People, especially hospital patients, want someone to know their stories. Teachers in English classrooms rely on narratives to learn their students' stories. Since learning patients' narratives is an emerging trend in the field of physical therapy as well as other medical practice, this chapter makes connections between writing, health coaching, and physical therapy to illustrate the value of narratives for patients not only in physical therapy, but also in other fields of medicine. Health coaching is a relatively new addition to the medical field that encourages patients to share their stories and set goals for themselves in addition to the goals set for them by their medical team. This chapter uses a multigenre format which discusses writing theory while simultaneously demonstrating an innovative narrative.

Incognito

In this chapter, we explore the neuroscience of grief and grieving. Even though the cognitive portion of the initiation into loss implores us to see a correlation between what is expected of us and the concept of reality as we move toward the outcome, the brain is meaning-driven, attempting to match new information with prior understanding. And as neural connections continue to develop and change throughout grief and grieving the “emotional monster” may not be capable of being quieted through support, whether professional or personal. The resistance from a cognitive approach is taken over by our effort to tame that “emotional monster” and images and feelings that are unique to the loss process stunt the capability of the brain to provide rational thinking. We end by picturing how our relentless search began, as we are in awe of what we intuitively know to be true, and that we are not fixed in toxicity, but can change the most challenging neurological situation. Our search was to understand the process of cognition as we move through grief and grieving. We wrote this chapter hoping it would shed a well-lit conversation on the most difficult time we will experience in our lives, the initiation into loss. The light shines on the neuroscience of this journey – as it would not honor ‘self' if we did not look at ‘self ‘in a wholesome way. We frame this chapter through four focus lenses: self and self-discovery focus; emotion focus; social context and role identity focus; and cognitive focus.