Helping Educational Institutions, Healthcare Facilities, and Organizations, as well Individual Professionals, Create and Function on Mindful Teams and Explain Their Critical Work.
Through inspirational lectures and small group workshops, Suzanne Gordon helps health care professionals and their organizations enhance patient safety by employing Team Intelligence and teamwork strategies. She also teaches storytelling methods to nurses, doctors, and other care providers who want to better explain their critical work to the public.
Based on years of research and writing about workplace problems, Gordon provides invaluable insights and practical communications tools to help improve the workplace environment. She helps organizations and individuals identify the kinds of deeply embedded attitudes and practices that lower staff morale, impede organizational success, and hinder the delivery of high quality care.
With deep understanding of the complexity of health care institutions, Gordon has worked with members and leaders of health care teams, and their professional organizations, to promote the information sharing and interprofessional cooperation that is critical to patient care.
Speaking Topics
- Using Storytelling to Enhance Patient Safety and Teamwork
- Making Your Story One that Counts: The Key to Increasing Staff Morale, Satisfaction, and Retention
- The VA as a National Leader in Healthcare Innovation
- Why the VA Must Be Cherished, Saved, and Strengthened
- The VA –Worth the Wait
- Mindfulness Training for Patient Safety and Teamwork
- Moving Beyond EI to TI: Why Team Intelligence Must Ground The Modern Healthcare Workplace
- Teaming and Mindfulness
- Get Out of the Way of Success: Power Dynamics and Patient Safety
- The Language of Real Teamwork: Why Words Matter and Some Just Have to Go.
These topics can be the subject of keynote lectures, panel discussions or workshops. At conferences, Suzanne Gordon suggests combining a keynote lecture with a one to two hour interactive workshop. This enhances participant engagement and leads to greater potential action on and involvement with the subject matter explored.
In her work consulting with healthcare organizations Suzanne Gordon not only offers keynote lectures and seminars, she also carefully tailors the above topics to construct long-term projects that lead to individual and organizational improvement.
Bedside Manners
Bedside Manners is a powerful team building tool for healthcare professionals and a remarkable teaching tool. It’s a play that helps staff reenact healthcare scenarios. In the process, everyone gains insight into the dynamics of their team communication. Why do individuals behave as they do? How can individual healthcare members learn to constructively collaborate?
Experience
Suzanne Gordon’s lectures, workshops, and consulting are informed by more than 35 years of experience observing health care professionals at work and noticing the language, power dynamics, and behaviors that lead to or undermine sustainable change and organizational success.
Suzanne Gordon helped to develop one of the first uses of narrative and storytelling in her work with nurses and other non-physician healthcare professionals. With colleagues at the University of Maryland School of Nursing, she developed one of the first teamwork courses taught at a health professional institution as a credited course. She is a TeamSTEPPS master trainer and has taught teamwork at healthcare institutions and educational programs in ten different countries.
Her play, Bedside Manners has used the power of theater to improve teamwork in over 60 hospitals in the US, Canada, Germany, and Europe. With colleagues in medicine and nursing, she is now developing a program — with a website and app — that applies mindfulness techniques to teaching teamwork skills and patient safety.
