Across the Johns Hopkins Medicine enterprise, there are many, many clinicians — doctors, nurses, social workers and more — who are dedicated to getting to know their patients as people. And these clinicians are eager to do everything they can to improve the lives of their patients.
That was the realization that struck Martha Abshire Saylor, the Mary Ousley CIM Scholar and the first CIM nurse scholar, when she and colleagues Scott Wright and Mary Catherine Beach put out a request for proposals in early 2024 for ideas aimed at humanizing the patient experience.
“Through this new microgrants program, we received close to 100 proposals from teams all across The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Bayview Medical Center and Suburban Hospital,” says Abshire Saylor. “Many proposals were spearheaded by nurses, whose entire mission it is to treat the whole patient, and many came out of specialties that are dedicated to getting to know patients as people — such as pediatrics, psychiatry, palliative care and women’s health.”
“Through this new microgrants program, we received close to 100 proposals from teams all across The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Bayview Medical Center and Suburban Hospital.” – Abshire Saylor
The microgrants program is among the first outreach efforts of CIM’s new Initiative for Humanizing Medicine (IHM). And already, the program has gone a long way in starting conversations and inspiring collaborations among people who might not otherwise have ever met to share ideas and dreams for improving care for their patients, says Abshire Saylor.
Ultimately, 14 projects were chosen to receive grants of $1,500, and the selected teams are now busy putting their plans into action. One team led by psychiatrist Idris Leppla, for example, is equipping patient safety attendants to use activity boxes to help keep delirious patients engaged. Another project is providing professional-quality photos of infants in the pediatric cardiac ICU soon after their birth and prior to heart surgery.
The microgrants program was inspired by the earlier success of CIM’s “pyramid grants” program, launched in 2011, which Cynthia Rand — the Mary Gallo CIM Scholar (2022) and an active member of the Initiative for Humanizing Medicine — oversaw at Bayview.
