Oh, and welcome to the gifted life podcast where we have conversations about organ tissue and eye donation. I'm Nory Steele. And Joey Boudreau. And we certainly appreciate you joining us.
There's so much going on here in the state. We have a number of students who have adopted LOPA and their goal is to help increase our donor registry. So we are excited to find out what they're going to do to make that happen, right? We're trying to reach a part of the population that doesn't normally talk about organ donation, but maybe you can help us.
We'll tell you how to do that. Also in this episode, lots of good stuff. Lots of good stuff, Lori. Now, I'll recover a segment.
So, we'll do organ recover agencies and they've done something that no other organ recovery agency has done before. They got it first. It is the first. Nobody forgets the first.
We love that. We'll also talk about what's called postvention. What is it? Why is it important?
Why are we talking about it today, tune in? And of course, as we do in every episode, we'll be honoring a hero. Yeah, that and much, much more here on the gifted life. What's important is that you partner with us to make sure that this information goes past you.
So spread the words. We're so easy to find now. Easy to find. Always look us up on lopa.org on our website.
And of course, we are on pretty much every podcast out now. So look us up the gifted life on any of your favorite podcasts. On our social media as well as on Facebook, we donate live, Louisiana. So a lot of things that we talk about.
You'll see pictures, post more information. They are also on Twitter, Instagram at donate life, LA. Yeah. And we want you to be a part of this.
We want this to be interactive. We have a hotline. You can call the message. We may use part of that here on the podcast.
So it's 504, 648, 3477. 504, 648, 3477. I think I got it. You got it.
All right. Here on the gifted life. Stay tuned. Thank you for coming on.
My pleasure. Thanks for having me. What inspired you guys to pursue Baldrige? Well, it goes back to the early 2000s when the health resources administration of the U.S.
government began what was called the national collaborative to share best practices with the increasing donation across the United States. So that was a very exciting time. Where frankly, we saw a donation increase about 25% over three or four years in the U.S. And prior to that, we had seen really very nominal increases.
At the same time, one of our healthcare systems in St. Louis, FSM Health, won the Baldrige Award. And they were the first health organization in the United States to win the ball. And I was intrigued by their approach to performance improvement, to the processes that they went through to not only get better as an organization, but to sustain those results.
For the fusion of those two events at the same time that sort of gave me, I would tell you that if you had talked to my staff in the prior 10 years, we were always looking for a business model that would help us get better. And so I was known for going to, and I would learn something interesting. I thought might have an impact. And we would go down that road, and we would teams or different kinds of approaches.
And my staff pretty well knew that if they waited me out within a year, I'd be on to something else. It was a bit disappointing that I was never able to find a model, if you will, that made sense and that we could continue to work on. So when I began to explore the Baldrige criteria, which is really just fundamental, great business practices based on the literature and science of management, I realized that there were key components to organization in areas where we were good, where we needed a lot of help. By looking at the criteria and by learning from other organizations across the United States that had Baldrige winners, I realized that this was really the way for us to go.
I should point out that health can now be the largest applicant, 50% of the applications in the United States are coming from healthcare organizations, but it really started in manufacturing. And Malcolm Baldrige was serving the Reagan administration, and some of you aren't old enough to remember that. But in those days, from a commercial standpoint, the United States was getting killed by the Japanese, and particularly in the area of quality. I mean, that was the beginning of the rise of everybody buying Japanese cars and running away from American-made cars because they were terrible.
Their quality was so deficient. Project that was established, adopt, best manufacturing, whether it's healthcare. It really doesn't matter. And one of the things you learned pretty quick as you get involved with the Baldrige, that a really basic criteria is to impact any kind of business.
And so you're able to learn from industries that you'd be surprised to learn from. For example, one of the two-time Baldrige winners, so I've listened to presentations by their leadership team, understanding your customer and the lengths that they go to. And so you know that's a really great, I would tell you that's not an accident. Systems behind that to make sure that happens.
So what I wanted to do, to take that commitment to excellence, systems and processes so that a long answer to a short question. And certainly creating excellence and sustaining it is something that you guys were able to do. When you guys started in the 10-year journey, basically you have doubled the amount of lives saved. Huge credit goes to you and your agency for that.
That is amazing. You mentioned the collaborative that took place in the early 2000s. You guys were in a midst of building the first standalone ICU and operating room within the OPO world. So you had the first one while you were trying to obtain the Baldrige award.
So tell me how Baldrige and the journey helped with establishing your facility the way it is. Well they're definitely related. So the reason we established an offsite organ recovery operation was really by listening to our customers and partners. In one of our major level one trauma centers had active trauma cases.
We received a complaint from one of our trauma surgeons. And he made the point very emphatically that he was supportive of donation. But when we were doing donors in the hospitals, we were very disruptive of the normal flow of things in the hospitals. And everything we need needs to be done yesterday.
And he made the point, pre-compelling, that he was supportive of donation but he also had other patients that he was trying to save their lives. And if we utilized resources heavily, that was going to make that difficult. Now you might remember, this isn't the early 2000s and in those days as part of the club, push us in the collaborative was increasing the number of organs transplanted per donor. And all of us were in multiple different inner vent increases, particularly thoracic organs in those days.
And we put in place up this where we were trying to streamline the time we spent in hospitals. And what we found after working on it very diligently for about a year and a half, that we were actually getting worse rather than getting better. And decided that maybe the only way we'd ever really addressed his concerns could we move a donor from the hospital. And we reflected back on the first heart lung donor that at the time that happened, this surgeon that was going to implant the heart lung, one of the donor in the adjacent OR suite.
And the donor was in a community hospital. So this was like 1987. And we got permission and we moved the donor on the respiratory, from the community hospital to the, so that gave birth to this idea of maybe there's another way to do this. And I must tell you, initially we were thinking about having a mobile OR, much like you have an MRI van or some of the mammography dams that travel around the area.
And then the more we thought about that, the logistics of that, we had built out enough and we essentially just had it and gave it a try to see if we could do this. So we've now transferred and recovered over 15 organ donors in our own facility, 190 organ donors in DCDs, which we do now, over 90% of them were moved to our facility. Three-bed ICU unit, we have brain room suites, we CT scanner, and we have part of calf capabilities. What we've really been able to do, move out of the hospital much more quickly.
And in fact, right now, at the particular brain did, on average, that patient moved from the hospital to our facility in less than five hours. So we spent very little time in the hospital and we have much more control over how the donor has managed, what kind of laboratory tests we perform, we do our own bronchoscopies. Essentially, anything we need to do to optimize the donor organs and we have more control over that. So what's next?
Oh, that's really a good question. I have to leave that to my successors because what's next is I'm retiring. So I'm kind of excited to see what they do. We've been blessed with the Board of Directors that have been, many of them with us for a long time and are well-represented of the other community and calculated risks.
So there will be new things, more and more opportunities for like-minded OPOs to have to find new ways to do. Our model is pretty expensive. There may be opportunities for, or maybe even consolidation. So happy soon to be retirement.
Well, thank you. That is sad to hear after doing all that good work, but I guess you've earned it, huh? Well, I don't know if I've earned it or not. I'm tired.
Well, we appreciate you joining us. This is Dean Capil with Mid-America Transplant Services and we want to say congratulations to Mid-America Transplant Services for securing the Baldridge National Quality Award for their commitment to excellence. Okay, guys, here on the Gifted Life, that's our Family Support segment. We have had a continuing conversation and this is kind of the close of that.
But Joey, we talked about suicide signs and myths. We talked about coping and today we're going to talk about postvention. It's a learning conversation. We want to spur those healthy conversations.
Yes, and of course, as we've talked about, Sally's been a very integral part of our family services and a big part of that is working with the suicide survivors. And this gentleman has been working with Sally. He's an expert. Like you said, he's developed what's called postvention.
Which we'll learn about. And he's been working with her. He works with Baton Rouge Crisis and a VINCH Center. They've been working together for quite some time.
At this time, I would like to introduce Dr. Frank Campbell. He is a former executive director of the Baton Rouge Crisis Center VINCHENTR Center. Past President of the American Association of Suicidology, forensic suicidologist.
And he's also appeared in three discovery channel documentaries about his work in developing the active postvention model known as the loss team. We'll hear more about the loss team from Frank. And we are so glad you're here with us today and welcome. Well, thank you.
Glad to be on the show. Would you please tell us a little bit more about the loss team to begin with? And then we have a few questions for you. Okay.
Well, postvention, if you think about it, the word post just modifies the mention. And the reference here is that in prevention, we know that that comes before something. The pre-part introduces whatever it is that's going to be done. Intervention means that it's coming during that activity.
So inter just introduces the middle port of that bridge going on. Postvention means after that. So if you think of suicide and you think of it as circle surrounded by these three words, then we know the prevention work is much of what you've been doing in the podcast part of this talking about warning times of things of families and individuals can be aware of. Intervention is when we train people to actually help a person at risk, not die by suicide.
So that may be face to face. It may be a crisis line. It could be that the person intervenes actually all on their own by just realizing they have a reason to live. So it's a very complex behavior, that intervention piece.
But the last one, postvention, are those activities that occur either after an attempt, after a death, and the focus I've spent most of my time on is after there's a death by suicide. Postvention would be those activities reaching out to the survivors. As you said earlier, meaning those left behind, not those who have attempted them to live. Those folks are attemptors.
And there's actually a new training that's come along that I'm calling post intervention to suggest when a person has attempted, but now there's a way to help them to be safe in the future. So we've actually introduced now in a different term, one of those matrix that are pre-entering post. But post for me, and then I'll just question if the day will be, there has been a tragic death of someone, not suicide. And we're reaching out to all of the different people that will be affected, impacted, and questioning what they could have done, what might have been different, how it affects them in the future.
And it will let all of their risk and future just by exposure to losing someone they care about the suicide. So that's the focus on the active postvention model means a week or two, those survivors, instead of them having to stumble on to us. So that's the difference about acting versus passing. Frank, when your team does go out or a team goes out to talk with the family at the scene, which is obviously very traumatic for not only the family involved, but for the responders that come out too to talk with them, how does this team talk with the families right there when there's so much going on?
Well, one of the tremendous values, unspoken values of this team is that most of the teams are made up primarily at individuals who have experienced this loss themselves. And so when they go to a scene, they have not only had that experience, they've gotten the help they needed to heal to the point where they could actually reach altruism and get back to others that are newly believed by suicide. So the main thing they do at the beginning is introduce themselves. And amazingly, you see the newly breathed look up and the lock eyes, because what is psychologically happening at that moment is the installation of hope.
The newly breathed receive a sense of hope and belief that they can survive this just by needing someone further down the road who has experienced a loss by suicide. And that is an unstated outcome that we see reported over and over and over throughout the world where the loss teams operate. And this locking eyes really is a signal that says, I'm here for you. I'm the volunteer that ballads at the scene.
And it's just a newly believed, you'll survive this. But their goal of the scene is to merely refer the family to where health is. But research I did early on in looking at people coming for help following suicide suggested that the average length of time between death and coming for help over four and a half years. That means that there are certain people coming in sooner.
But we also had people coming in 10, 20 years out for the average. What such a dramatic figure. But we thought, how could we reduce the length of time between death and getting help? Much like organ procurement, you want to get out as quick as you can.
Everything matters sooner is better than later. But that same philosophy guided my interest in trying to be after seeing so we could refer people quicker. And what we learned in the teams that he bears out among all the crisis programs and all-seeing programs that use this active model is that people come in on average under 60 days if they've had a lost team base. And that's held up now for all these years.
So for me, we have found the magic key to helping people get help sooner. And that's by letting them know when they're in this horrible place where they can't imagine life being any better. But through the installation of hope, the volunteer who comes out and the knowledge of where to go when they're ready and the role modeling of somebody who says, I've been where you are and I'm here because I went there. We find people come in on average within two months and get help helping me to survive.
What is considered one of the most traumatic and dangerous grief processes we know. Wow. So talking about being able to be impactful on someone's life at a time when they have nowhere else to turn, this really can make a major difference as far as people just going through the grieving process, making sense to some degree of what's happened. You know, this is very similar if you think about it to families who do organ donation, they have a chance for something good to come from a loss that has been difficult to them regardless of the cause of death.
Welfare survivors, they not only have that opportunity to consider organ donation, they maybe get enrolled or they're family member, they've already been a great to this, they just forgot that. Not only do they have that opportunity for something good to come out, but now they see even something good to come from them. They could actually experience what is today in the literature called post-traumatic growth. We know a lot about post-traumatic loss.
You know post-traumatic stress and we know that all the dangers of it being exposed are a traumatic situation. But there actually is quite a body of evidence growing post-traumatic growth. And that's what we see when the folks who not only go out to the scene, they're living in the campus of that, but they create that internal, carnal of belief that maybe one day this person could make something good come out of their tragedy. And actually one day being on the other side of that couch and talking to somebody to do the grieving.
We've seen that happen multiple times. That's the most consistent story is someone says, I remember the day someone came to my home and now I'm going in helping people to do the same thing. Well, yeah, that's one of the most important pieces of information. I think that any family member wants to be able to hear or experience that not all is lost and to have that hope for the future.
That's very difficult sometimes for people to even realize something like this could be available to them. And, you know, too, Frank, I think just listening to what you're having to say here, I'm going to do a little bit more research from the information you're talking about with the growth aspect because I think our families could certainly benefit from myself and my coworkers having a little bit more in-depth information about that to present it in more of a positive manner. So that's just great information. Thank you so much.
And Dr. Campbell, if you could, I know that you said there's a lot of information. There's a conference coming up later this year where our lost team volunteers gather and we do want to give folks information if they want to go on the website like we did and just kind of learn and read at our own leisure. But it's lostteam.com, lostteam.com if you want more information about what was talked about today, but this national conference is pretty impactful, right?
Right. It stays in the same location for two years and then moves to another part of the United States. And so the seventh conference is coming up next year in Fort Worth, Texas for the second year there. And then it will move to Phoenix, Arizona for two years.
The day's right now, September 28th and 29th of 2016 in Fort Worth, my website will have a registration posting at some point. So anyone who goes to www.lostteam.com would find that. Now let me just make sure that I've spelled this word. It's L-O-S-S-T-V-A-M and it stands for local outreach to suicide survivors.
That's what the loss part means because the local is so much more important than having some national program. The national conference is just an opportunity for us to share experiences, learn from others. It looks like your podcast. It's a chance to not just shop with but stop and sharpen the axe a little bit more than what we could do to make our job easier.
Wow. Well, we have learned, you know, we like to spur those healthy conversations. So we appreciate you taking the time out to be with us and to help us, Dr. Campbell.
Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for the important work you're doing. Thanks Frank.
Talk to you soon. It is now time in the podcast where we pause to honor Ahener. Absolutely, Laura. As we do in every podcast, we will be honoring in this podcast, Connor Morsell.
And these words are from mom. They wanted to tell us about their beautiful baby who saved lives through donation. His name is Connor. He was only two and a half years old.
He was a baby child and the most important person in their lives. Mom quit her job to be a stay at home mom. And she's so glad that she did. She has two years of spending every second of every day with that beautiful baby boy.
They tried for 13 years to have a child of their own when they finally decided to adopt and that road led them to Connor on April 22nd, 2005. He was adopted from Korea. She says when he got off the plane with his escort and was placed on our arms, he looked at us as though to say, where have you been? I love that part.
On June 30th, my 40th birthday, mom writes, we left Connor with a friend. My husband and I went to dinner in a movie. On that night, Connor died tragically. We don't know exactly what happened.
All we know is that our lives will never be the same after losing our special little angel. This is why we decided to donate Connor's organ so that another family would not have to feel the pain that we felt and to know that Connor's life, no matter how short, would have as much meaning to others as he did to us. And this is pretty powerful. There is more on our website, lopa.org faces of donation.
Click on Connor's story and you'll see his adorable little pictures and you can read more about this story and you can see other heroes there. And that's what this is all about honoring those who gave the gift of life. At this point in the podcast, let's pause and say thank you to Connor for the gift of life. Question and answer time.
What happens if I die in Texas but I'm registered in Louisiana? We have an answer. We do. We still have the ability to access each state's registry, whether in Texas or Tennessee or Florida for that matter.
So we have the ability 24 hours a day to access and then we can make sure that everyone's wishes are followed. It's like a team effort to make life happen. You have more questions, you want to expand further info at lopa.org or you can call us on that hotline, 504-648-3477. That's 504-648-3477.
Another episode of the gift of life in the books. That's right, Lori. We want to give a special thanks to Dean Capil, the CEO of Mid-America Transplant Services, and new soon-to-be retiree, which I'm very jealous of. I'm here smiling when he says that.
But yeah, congrats to them. Absolutely. Before they're winning the Baldrige award, it is an amazing accomplishment. And also I want to give a special thanks to Dr.
Frank Campbell. He developed a post-vincion model and gave us a little bit more about his expertise on suicide, all of the time. And more on that, lossteam.com. L-O-S-S-team.com.
So thanks to them. Also, I want to say a special thanks to some special kiddos. I'm going to put as many S's in here as possible. But they have adopted Lopa and what they want to do is help us increase the registry.
And so they hold table sits on campuses. So you'll see this at LSU, South Eastern, other campuses as well. And what they're doing is helping us in the classroom on campus to spread awareness about organ donation because they're on that same level. They are passionate about donation and we appreciate everything.
And we hope that you can join us as well. Spread the word about this podcast. Follow us on social media. It helps spread the word.
Get involved. If you're interested in events going on across the state, jump in, do something that you have it done to help us spread awareness. You can do it. Join the team.
Help us save more lives. We'll see you next time.