Stories of Care

Jenna Tanner (00:03): You don't think you're going to have a heart attack at 46 years old. It was a crushing pain in my chest. It was frightening. I passed out in my office, which is two rooms from where I had left my phone, and when I came to, I didn't have any muscles in my body. I guess that's the only way to describe it. Speaker 2 (00:24): Welcome to Hospitals In Focus from the Federation of American Hospitals. Here's your host, Chip Kahn. Chip Kahn (00:34): Thank you for joining me for this special episode of Hospitals In Focus. The member hospitals of the Federation of American Hospitals work tirelessly to protect and promote the health and healthcare of Americans. So at the heart of our efforts are the professionals who care for them. This episode is dedicated to showcasing a few extraordinary stories of care provided by our members. (01:01): These stories highlight the essential and life-saving work being done at our hospitals across the country. First, we'll hear from Amy Capella Smith, CEO of Foundations Behavioral Health, a UHS Hospital in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Amy shares the innovative approaches her team is using to address behavioral health challenges for children and young adults, as well as a special visit they received from Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, underscoring the importance of their work. Amy Capella Smith (01:35): My name is Amy Capella Smith, and I'm the Chief Executive Officer at Foundations Behavioral Health in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. So I've been with Foundations for nine years, and I've been the CEO for about two and a half. We provide specialized behavioral health treatment and educational programs to children as young as five years old all the way through the age of 21. (01:56): We serve upwards of a thousand children each year, and we are one of only a few programs in the country that provides highly specialized services to children with autism and other neurodiversities, especially for those that have significant needs in areas such as communication, social skills, completement of daily activities such as getting dressed and ready for the day, and those who present with particularly challenging behaviors related to either self-injury or aggression. (02:24): Our programs include an acute psychiatric inpatient facility, residential treatment facility, and we also have four independently licensed academic school programs called LifeWorks Schools. We provide kids with the behavior support they need, whether that's mental health treatment, communication support, integrated sensory supports, and we focus on helping kids to access their behavioral health treatment needs as well as their educational needs. And it's really important too that they access their medical care needs in the community, so helping to get them successfully to doctor's appointments and things like that. (02:56): We have about 270 children in our school programs. Our inpatient hospital is 60 beds, and our residential program is 62 beds. So with kids coming and going, all told in a year, it's about a thousand. Foundations is particularly a special place in that the services we're offering are really unique and not provided in most areas of the country. It's really challenging, and I think that the rewards are definitely equal to that when you see we're doing, I would say, really good stuff here. (03:24): Of course, no bias on my part, but we're meeting a need that's largely unmet, and to be able to see a child come into our program who maybe has not been able to access school services has not been able to get the behavioral health treatment that they need, and so because of that has not been out of their home a lot, has not had relationships, has not been able to communicate their needs and things like that, and see kids really achieve success when they're given the right supports has been incredibly rewarding. (03:50): I credit that to our staff. They're extremely compassionate. They're very dedicated, very talented. They're using evidence-based practices to really help kids achieve some very important life goals, and that's rewarding every day. Some of the challenges we face are around getting kids the aftercare services that they need and really getting them services across the full continuum of the lifespan, right. (04:13): So we'll have five and six-year-olds come into our hospital program, for instance, who've never received any services before in their community, and we see that they're able to quickly start to learn basic communication skills, find ways to communicate with us what their basic needs are, and that helps them to regulate their emotions, right. And we're able to introduce a sensory program that helps them regulate those emotions. And so with the right supports, we see how well they're doing, but unfortunately, a lot of kids are still kind of falling through the cracks early on in their development. (04:42): And then we also have 21-year-olds who, what the system calls age out of these types of programs, right, and there really aren't sufficient supports in the community to support these individuals into adulthood. We get them pretty far as far as the skills they're able to develop and what they're able to do, but these are largely individuals who are going to need support throughout their life. I think that's a challenge for certainly our area here and the whole country really is to decide what this is going to look like to treat individuals with severe autism across the lifespan. (05:14): Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, who serves in the US House of Representatives and represents all of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in a small part of Montgomery County, was able to come and visit Foundations. He was able to tour one of our hospital units. He was able to tour one of our schools. He met a young man in our residential program, and that was really exciting for us. We really appreciated the opportunity to talk to him about the services we're providing and about the ways we're contributing to our community. And he asked some really meaningful and engaging questions about that work to help him better understand its significance. (05:47): Really helped us to be able to highlight what we do to someone who has a say in how... where the funding goes, where resources are allocated for children and programs like ours and for our employees as well. So it was really great to have him here. One of the really nice things that Congressman Fitzpatrick did for us during his visit was he presented us with a American flag that had been flown over the US Capitol and recognition for our contributions to the community and the innovative services we're providing. And that was just such an honor and really thoughtful and generous gesture that he made in recognizing what we're doing here at Foundation. (06:21): So we truly appreciated that. I absolutely think he left here understanding kind of what some of our challenges are around workforce development, what some of our challenges are around retention here. There's a national shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists. There's a national shortage of teachers, nurses, board-certified behavior analysts, and all of these professions are individuals that are so instrumental to our continued success and our ability to grow. (06:45): So for us, a big focus is solving for how we attract and train and retain those individuals, how we support their ongoing education, really looking to see that there'd be student loan reimbursement programs that are not tied to working within a specific type of organization, but can support all individuals who are doing this really important work. Foundations Behavioral Health is part of a larger health management company called Universal Health Services or UHS, which is a publicly-traded company that operates about 400 facilities throughout the United States and Puerto Rico and the UK. (07:18): The support that we get from UHS has been tremendous and, I think, really helps organizations like ours to be more successful because we have resources we would not otherwise have access to. And so that's been really great. UHS also, I like to say, likes to grow from within, and they definitely walk that walk and not just talk that talk. So they're definitely committed to growing their employees and promoting from within, giving people opportunities to develop leadership skills. We're doing really something very, very unique in meeting an unmet need in our community for these kids. Chip Kahn (07:57): What a story from Amy and the team at Foundations Behavioral Health. Their dedication to improving behavioral health care for young people is truly remarkable. Next, we turn to the story of Jenna Tanner, a patient at Hillcrest Hospital in Ardent Health Hospital. (08:15): Jenna's experience is a powerful reminder of the critical importance of timely and expert medical care. Heart disease is the number one killer of women in this nation, and Jenna's story of survival against incredible odds is both harrowing and inspiring. Jenna Tanner (08:35): My name is Jenna Tanner. I live in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. On March 9th of 2022, I had a heart attack. I was home alone, and my husband was at work. And I had just gotten my kids to school that morning, and I passed out in my home office of a massive heart attack. I was actually doing routine house chores. I had had some minor chest pains that I would say were like a pinching here and there that I attributed to possibly catching the flu, which my kids had just gotten over. I didn't have any previous issues. I didn't have cholesterol issues. I didn't have high blood pressure. I didn't have... I'm not an obese person. (09:20): I've never had a heart palpitation in my life, but it didn't matter that it all felt similar to something else that I've... some illness or this or that because it was a heart attack, and I should have gotten myself checked out. I was having a small pinch in my chest for two days prior to this, so there was an indication that something was coming. What I didn't know and didn't find out until later was that my heart was only functioning on the right side, had zero blood flow on the left side of my heart. It was frightening. I passed out in my office, which is two rooms from where I had left my phone, and when I came to, I didn't have any muscles in my body. I guess that's the only way to describe it. (10:04): I had no way to move. And so I laid there, and by that time, I knew I was having a heart attack because it wasn't just a pinch. It was a crushing pain in my chest. When I would try to roll myself over or move my body, I would pass out again. And every time that happened, I thought I wouldn't wake up again. I knew what was happening to me, and it was very frightening. But it was about an hour's time, and in that time, I did a lot of thinking about life, I think as people do, and thinking about my family and my children. And every time, I was worried that I was going to stop breathing. So every time I would exhale, I would kind of make a humming sound, a... if I could hear my own voice. (10:52): And as my voice started to get stronger, I realized that maybe there was a chance if I called out, somebody would hear me. I cried for help, hoping my neighbor was outside or something, and instead, I heard my cat. She kind of came pattering across the floor, and I could hear her little feet. Instinctively, I reached up and patted her head, and I thought, "Well, if I can do that, surely I can do more." And then in my head, "I was thinking I didn't want my son to try to walk home and... from school, and then him be the one to find me." And I don't know what I did, but somehow I was able to flip myself over, and I started kind of army crawling through the kitchen and to the living room. (11:42): I did a lot of faceplants because my muscles weren't working at all. I couldn't hear much of anything. It felt like I was constantly trying to faint. But I made it to my phone, and I called my husband, and then I called 911. About the time I got to the front door and the front window, I could see the fire truck pulling up. I watched the firemen come across my lawn, and I opened my door, and I just looked at him, and I said, "Help me." It was all a blur. I couldn't see anyway. I think my eyes were filled with tears just knowing that somebody was there to help me. Once I got to the hospital, they rushed me into the cath lab, and I got to meet Dr. Zimmerman for the first time. (12:24): And he didn't really say much. I think the whole room kind of went silent. Dr. Zimmerman gave me a local anesthetic at the entry point, which was my groin. And he... I think the first thing he did was he put the Impella pump in my heart. What the Impella device does is it pumps your heart for you when it's too weak to pump. So it immediately started putting blood flow back into the left side of my heart, and he could go in and stint the main artery at the very top left side of your heart, not in one of the descending arteries, which is basically a massive coronary. I had people rushing into the room, people that were standing behind the window and watching prior came rushing into the room. (13:09): And I remember one doctor asked me, "We all just want to know what you're thinking." And I told her, I'm thinking about my kids. And they were all high-fiving and fist-bumping each other. And Dr. Zimmerman came over, and he was teary-eyed and told me how... I don't know. I don't remember exactly what he said, but I know he said that my heart attack was more serious than what I thought. And they took me to ICU, and they left the Impella pump in me for five days. My nurse was amazing. She kept me sane because I couldn't move. The Impella pump made it so that I had to be immobilized, and I couldn't sit up or really even turn my head. I had to kind of stare at the ceiling. (13:53): So she kept me talking about my life, and she would visit with me, and she spent most of her time with me, which I thought was really incredible. I'm skipping so much. I know I am, and I'm trying to smile through it, but it's really difficult to talk about. It really is. The hospital staff made me feel amazing. They treated me like I was some kind of celebrity. It was really kind of cool because I had never... I can't describe it. They would come by from other parts of the hospital just so they could... to meet me, I guess, or something. I was kind of their miracle kid. And then, at the end of the five days, they pulled the Impella pump out. I seemed to be doing a lot better. (14:35): I was able to sit up that night. And then, the next morning, they moved me into ICSU. In general, my hospital stay felt like a stay at a five-star hotel. I had lots of visitors, staff members. People that only saw me for the first surgery came back to visit later and just to make sure I was doing okay. I don't have enough good... I mean, there's so many wonderful things I could say about my... about the hospital that I never thought... Really, you don't think about hospitals in terms of like, "I want to go stay there." But when I left the hospital, there were months afterwards that I just... that's the only place I wanted to go back to. And that's very real. (15:17): And I don't know if that was PTSD or being scared that I wasn't safe at home, but it was also... a part of it also was the environment and the people that took care of me. The last day that I was at the hospital, the staff brought me this journal that they had all signed and written in. They brought me a little gift bag with a necklace in it, like a heart necklace, and some candy that I could eat. And this journal, this really awesome journal where everybody had signed it. They check on me regularly, even now. I mean, the whole reason I'm doing this right now is because of Dr. Zimmerman, him and other staff that have kind of pushed me out of the nest, so to speak, and said, "You need to get out there and talk to people." (16:04): And if it wasn't for them, I wouldn't even be talking about all this. But they have been with me every step of the way, and here we are almost two years later, and they're still there checking in on me and taking care of me and making sure... I mean, Dr. Zimmerman became my regular cardiologist, and I don't know how often that happens. The surgeon that saves your life becomes your cardiologist. But to me, that's pretty important, I think. It's like it's they're family now. It's different. Chip Kahn (16:38): Jenna's story is a testament to the life-saving care provided by our member hospitals. What initially she thought was the flu or COVID turned out to be a massive heart attack. Yet, thanks to the swift and expert response from the team at Hillcrest Hospital, she's here to share her journey with us today. (16:58): These stories remind us of the vital role that our hospitals and healthcare professionals play in their communities. Their dedication and compassion are the backbone of patient care, and they continue to inspire us to advocate for policies that support their invaluable work. Thanks for listening in. We hope you're having a great summer. We're excited to bring you more inspiring guests in September. Stay tuned. Speaker 2 (17:27): Thanks for listening to Hospitals In Focus from the Federation of American Hospitals. Learn more at fah.org. Follow the Federation on social media @FAHhospitals and follow Chip @ChipKahn. Please rate, review, and subscribe to Hospitals In Focus. Join us next time for more in-depth conversations with healthcare leaders. Speaker 5 (17:49): Voxtopica.