Becker's Hospital Review

53 WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP COVID-19 'severely weakened' surgical innovation, says Johns Hopkins healthcare policy expert By Katie Adams T he pandemic imposed a significant delay on surgical innovation, one that will require a good deal of time and funding to overcome, accord- ing to Toby Gordon, ScD, a healthcare policy and innovation expert and professor at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University. In a May 12 Newswise Q&A, Dr. Gordon said the shutdown of elective care and research laboratories made it impossible for most informal interactions between colleagues (where innovative ideas are often born) to occur. She also said it prevented clinical studies from happening, which are often re- quired to develop and test innovative products and treatments. She said surgical innovation is delayed by a lack of funding. With hospitals still recovering from the elective surgery revenue they lost, they don't have money for innovation investments or new products. With fewer innovations funded, the pipeline gets smaller. To overcome these delays, Dr. Gordon recommended more community engage- ment across the research process, more inclusive clinical research participation and dissemination of innovative products in a culturally competent way. n Why the privileged may overstate their struggles By Molly Gamble P eople who have benefited from their skin color, family wealth or networks may feel psychological pressure to prove their personal merit. When successful people come from privi- lege, their experience can clash loudly with America's bootstrap myth, in which success is — or should be — achieved through a com- bination of two things: talent and hard work. One way people from higher-income brack- ets deal with the potentially guilt-inducing dissonance is by exaggerating claimed strug- gles they overcame to achieve their success, according to behavioral research out of Stan- ford (Calif.) Graduate School of Business. "ere's this anxiety about being in the top class," said Brian Lowery, PhD, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Gradu- ate School of Business. "Why do you deserve what you have? If you point out that they benefit because they're part of this group, that makes them uncomfortable." Dr. Lowery details the findings in a paper based on a series of experiments involv- ing nearly 2,400 subjects. In five of the ex- periments, the participants attended elite higher educational institutions. Two other studies included subjects with incomes be- tween $75,000 and $100,000 and incomes over $100,000. e experiments found when people con- fronted evidence of their class privilege, they claimed to have experienced more hardships in their personal lives because these hard- ships imply personal merit. When privileged participants could not claim hardship, they claimed greater effort in the workplace and greater effort on a difficult task. Dr. Lowery notes that the urge to conceal the influence of one's own privilege has potential to cause harm in today's organizations. "If you have someone who comes from a priv- ileged economic background, they're not gen- erally starting in the mail room," he explains. "But because people don't understand how they got to where they are, they're not likely to address the inequities that exist." n Why a pediatrician wants to quantify childhood trauma By Kelly Gooch N adine Burke Harris, MD, a pediatrician and California's first surgeon gener- al, is among those raising awareness about a health assessment to quantify adverse childhood experiences, The Washington Post reported May 15. The Adverse Childhood Experiences term comes from a study published by the CDC and Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente in the late 1990s, which found association between trauma and health. An ACEs score typically assess- es a person's experiences with traumas, such as abuse, neglect and witnessing domestic violence, before 18 years old. Dr. Harris told the Post that she believes more awareness about ACEs — via a new website run by nonprofit ACE Resource Network — can help address emotional and psychological effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The website provides in- formation about ACEs and allows users to take a quiz to learn their score. Dr. Harris and other supporters of the measure are proponents because they say childhood trauma can be connected to higher likelihood of chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes, stroke, heart disease and depression. However, critics question the usefulness of the measure — since there is not necessarily a definitive healthy or unhealthy score — and note that it does not include other potential traumatic childhood events such as bullying and rac- ism, according to the Post. Still, Dr. Harris told the newspaper, "When we have a public understanding and a public narrative that early adversity is harmful to our health, it extends our understanding of trauma writ large: racism, immigration and other factors also increase our health risk." n

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