Those tasked with healthcare leadership in America have faced unprecedented toxic stress and trauma for many years, enduring intense criticism, scrutiny, and threats all while navigating uncertainty, profound professional and organizational stress and trauma, and significantly increased workloads. This has a profound effect on mental, emotional, and physical health and, in turn, productivity and satisfaction; workers are experiencing unprecedented levels of overwhelm and exhaustion. Exacerbated by political and social unrest and violence, economic instability, and the global pandemic, the cumulative exposure harms health, productivity, professional and personal joy, and degrades workplace cultures. The chronicity of increased and excessive work burden, workforce challenges including declines in autonomy, exposure to unrelentingly high doses of secondary and vicarious trauma, aggressive encounters, moral distress and injury, and an acceleration of anti-science attitudes all have done considerable harm to professional satisfaction, and provider-patient relationships.

Concomitantly, there has been a steep and rapid erosion of professional collegiality, friendships, and opportunities for direct engagement. While the case for trauma-informed workplaces is well established [5], the current realities facing most organizations and employees urgently calls for something more: more meaningful, more interactive, and more readily applied to challenging daily interactions. There is an urgent need for advanced leadership skills and experiential professional development to move leaders, employees, and cultures beyond trauma-informed; Lodestar provides the most comprehensive and complete series of Trauma-Responsive (TR) professional development & culture alignment programs currently available, anywhere. In this 60-minute Keynote session, Dr. Kemia Sarraf provides a broader and readily accessible paradigm for understanding the impact of toxic stress exposure, the multivariate sources of trauma, and insight and tools for immediately actionable, restorative steps for both individuals and organizations. There is, in fact, Hope in Broken Things.  

Learning Objectives: Recognize and define the manifestations of trauma in healthcare professionals, including subtle signs of burnout, vicariou Identify and name the stages of developing psychological safety and trust within teams, Identify and predict the cumulative and compounding impact of toxic stress, name the disruptors, and name how to implement