A study was done by the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. The organization held multiple sessions with the hospital staff and first responders that cared for the trauma patients in the immediate aftermath of the event. They also followed that conference with another learning and healing session one year later. The personal and professional effects that resulted to the relatively small group of healthcare heroes involved in caring for these patients was profound. If we dare expand this scenario out to the current day COVID-19 pandemic, there are parallel effects that will exist. However, in our current trauma event, almost every single healthcare provider in the world has become a vulnerable first responder.

In healthcare, we continuously strive to learn from prior studies and evolve with our care. Medicine is constantly advancing and we proudly advance with it in order to best care for our patients. But what about caring for ourselves? Can we learn from prior studies about how large scale trauma events affect the physician’s ability to provide clinical and personal care in the aftermath. Can we use the learnings gained from the Schwartz Center sessions and apply them to ourselves as clinicians as we navigate through the challenges of practice during COVID-19?

According to The Schwartz Center, upon debriefing after the Boston Marathon bombing, “the most common theme that caregivers expressed was guilt — guilt that they hadn’t done enough at the scene, that they had been prevented from helping, that they weren’t trained in how to care for patients in a trauma situation, or that they had left before the bombs exploded and opted not to return to the scene.” Similarly, during the onset and at the peak of the COVID-19 crisis, physicians were left helpless and hopeless. All of the critical care training and ventilator management techniques and screening processes that we have accepted as medical scripture were deemed irrelevant. It seemed as if all efforts were powerless as patients’ lungs, kidneys, livers and hearts just defied medical logic and continued to fail. Physicians felt betrayed by the healthcare system as a whole with a lack of proper protective equipment and literally went to war without gear. It seemed like this all happened over night, perhaps fortuitously preventing us from truly thinking about what was in front of us.

Adaptrack hears the screams of the physicians, along with the cheers of the healthcare heroes’ fans. Physicians globally learned the same lessons that the frontline physicians learned in Boston in 2013. As some physicians were shut down and others were pushed to their limits, we all learned about finding balance. We learned about accepting gratitude and accolades without letting them distract us from our mission. We learned about mindfulness and well-being. We learned about risk. Risk to ourselves, our practice and our patients/community. Just as healthcare workers have learned from prior traumas and studies, Adaptrack will continue to learn with you daily as a digital assistant for any challenges that we may encounter.

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