What are you thankful for?
It’s a question that many of us don’t necessarily pose outside of a moment of grief, or of deep reflection, or an effort to distract ourselves from our present circumstances. But at the end of one calendar year and the beginning of another, it’s natural to take stock of things, even if only out of habit. Moreso now than maybe ever, in the age of the Great Resignation, as America has redefined its relationship to work, many professionals balance ephemeral questions like these against their measure of material goals. At the turn of the season, we asked a handful of medical imaging professionals to share with us, in their own words, the people, moments, and things that have kept them grounded and grateful in 2023.
For Jamie Coder, operations manager for enterprise radiation safety at the Mayo Clinic, the weight of an unprecedentedly difficult year for her family was tempered by the support and leadership of her multistate team of professionals.
“As a leader, you always hope that your team will rise to the occasion, and excel with or without you,” Coder said. “My team showed resiliency, teamwork, and thrived while I was unexpectedly out for multiple months. Maintaining a quality radiation safety program in a large enterprise across four states is not an easy task, but my team knows the importance of collaboration, communication, and influence to help drive safe practices in research and clinical practice.”
In October 2022, Coder’s daughter, Zoe, was in a devastating car accident that left the high-achieving student rebuilding her life after a traumatic brain injury. Suddenly, the intense demands of managing a multisite radiation safety program melted into the background, as the family focused all of its energies on her recovery.
Coder was away from work from October 2022 to February 2023, worked remotely for a month from February to March, and then returned to her Rochester, Minnesota onsite office in a hybrid capacity mid-March. During that time, her department was changing dramatically, shedding personnel to retirements, onboarding new ones, and creating another brand-new position, all in the time she was away from the office.
“I have 16 employees with 60 years of combined longevity here at Mayo Clinic retiring,” Coder said. “One was an analyst of 40 years who’d built our application and also ran the department as an IT person; we had to change that position and split up the roles to make sure it fit job descriptions. Staffing was an issue for us just like in radiology.”
While Coder and her family rallied around Zoe, her department rolled along, navigating through the personnel changes until she was able to work remotely from Denver, Colorado, where her daughter was receiving rehabilitative care. Throughout it all, she felt supported at the highest levels by her colleagues.
“Mayo Clinic has just done remarkable with support and allowing me to work,” Coder said. “My director basically told my administrator that he didn’t care if I worked from Mars. I’ve only been in this role a year, so to have that camaraderie and support with a new work group was really important. They let me disconnect the entire time; they took it on between my leader and the staff themselves. They’re high professionals.”
In the meantime, Zoe has continued to make small, steady improvements as she works to regain some semblance of the life that was taken from her in an instant. Coder remains grateful to have had the flexibility to have been there for her daughter in the most critical moments that followed her injury.
“In our situation specifically, we’re lucky enough that we got past the point where we know she’s going to have a quality of life,” Coder said. “Physically, she’s trying to walk again, and we’re getting some steps in. She only has three credits left to graduate even after losing her entire junior year – we call it Zoe 2.0 versus Zoe 1.0 – but it’s hard not to think of what we lost.”
“It was a crazy time,” she said. “We’re thankful that she’s here. We’re living today as today. You can’t control anything else. We just literally focus on today. There’s no real past, no real future, there’s just today. We celebrate the moments.”
Even in the most trying of moments, Coder said she believes her circumstances offered her an opportunity to see the best of what people can be. The professionalism of her coworkers both upheld the stated values of work-life balance in her workplace and gave her the peace of mind that her career could be rightly put on pause while she tended to her daughter.
Coder said she also feels her bond with her husband has never been greater; he knows how to keep her upright when she feels weak. She will always be forever grateful to their family, friends, community and Mayo Clinic for the support and love.
“That’s your goal as a leader: to hopefully instill that ability to keep plugging on and hang in there; hopefully times get better,” Coder said. “In the workplace you have to want to look for it, too. The negatives can engulf you. I had to be human, and they had to deal with a very human situation with their leader, and they did it with grace.”
Mario Pistilli, executive director of imaging services at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, said that the effort displayed by his team during the past calendar year and stretching to the outset of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has made him thankful for their resilience, not only in the workplace, but amid the other demands of the day.
“It’s presented an array of challenges and successes that really have reshaped my understanding of patient care and teamwork,” Pistilli said. “First, I’m really thankful for the resilience displayed by our imaging teams. Our team’s flexibility and adaptability have shown their collective resilience and the ability to adapt to future challenges.”
“We had to navigate staffing shortages and logistical challenges like getting supplies, and it was great to see other departments pitching in to make sure care wasn’t compromised,” he said. “It was nice to throw some scrubs on and pitch in when we needed it. It reinforced the centrality of patient-focused care and solidified the collaborative approach. I hope we can keep these lessons with us.”
Although Pistilli acknowledges that the intensity of the trials of the past few years will fade with time, he believes that the recollection of what was best about the human spirit in enduring them can be kept alive; namely, by acknowledging how the sacrifices colleagues made for one another were personally meaningful, not just in the moment, but thereafter.
Better still, he believes that behind that acknowledgment is an ability – and willingness – to do something different when a need is understood and voiced. It’s the very essence of teamwork and collaboration at a human level.
“These memories will fade over time,” Pistilli said. “We have to keep it alive by recognizing the little things: saying, ‘I appreciate that you stayed late,’ or ‘I appreciate what you did for me’; whatever it is, being thankful for each other, and remembering that we did take care of each other. To say, ‘We have things that we can do better together,’ we have that core collegiality where we can do that, whatever those things are.”
“I remember staff reaching out and asking, ‘Who’s got toilet paper?’; bringing in grocery items; working double shifts or more when their colleagues or family were out with COVID – and they never really complained,” he said. “That was a constant. There were so many moments where the team worked together to figure out how they were going to keep the area staffed, and knowing who was going to do what, and they did a great job of coming together on their own and figuring out how they were going to make that work.”
“The manner in which our team members looked out for each other – sharing resources, emotional support – these acts of kindness show that we’re not just colleagues but a community joined by a shared mission,” Pistilli said. “All these things remind us why we entered into the profession in the first place, which is to make a difference in people’s lives.”
Moreover, the underlying challenges of working in pediatrics, which include not only managing patients but their families and guardians, are significant; as Pistilli noted, the stakes are very high.
“We have a very high proportion of really sick kids, and a patient population that is complex and really can’t be done elsewhere, and our teams know that,” he said. “It’s not really an option for us to say, ‘We’re not going to have CTs today if you have some really sick child in the PICU.’ We’ve got to get it done somehow.”
As the executive director of radiology and patient transport at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, Brian Fox said he’s thankful for the hope medical imaging will continue to deliver.
“There’s hope for dementia treatment that we haven’t seen before, and imaging plays a crucial role in theranostic treatments to patients with prostate cancer, and expanded access to breast cancer screening programs,” Fox said. “For imaging, 2024 is an exciting period. We have good people on our teams delivering extraordinary care and support to our patients.”
Like Pistilli and Coder, Fox is equally grateful for “the sense of community in radiology” that has underpinned staff morale in the workplace, not just in the darkest hours of the COVID-19 stressors, but, in a more general sense, across the continuum of a health care industry that is adapting to challenges, doing more with less during shortages, and finding new ways to lead after a period of historic stress.
“There’s things that they faced that we haven’t seen in our lifetimes,” Fox said. “When you go through this trauma together, I don’t think we’ll know the impact and what was done there for a couple years. It’s still early on; as we research and start to reflect, it’s going to be interesting to see. There are things I didn’t think we’d ever see. Generationally, you have to respect that everyone went through this, and that everyone responds differently.”
Fox is also pleased to see that, beyond merely suffering through the pain of the pandemic and the toll that it’s taken on teams like those he manages, the medical imaging world is adapting to the lessons learned from those extreme circumstances. These include, in no particular order: the value of remote work in the clinical space, recruiting and retaining qualified staff in a labor market shortage, and an emphasis on the value of a compassionate approach to all manner of challenges paired with efforts to address the underlying issues they reflect.
“It’s been wonderful to see the collaboration in coming together and supporting each other, I think there’s lessons,” Fox said. “We have opportunity to listen and learn, leaning into authentic leadership and empathy with teams we support. The upcoming year looks very hopeful and promising.”
Brenda DeBastiani, director of imaging at Bravera Health Spring Hill of Spring Hill, Florida, said that beyond merely being thankful for any specific moment or metric of her past year, she’s working to maintain “an attitude of gratitude” through and through her experiences in the office. Foremost among the ways she’s been best able to do that has been through finding an employer that values everything she brings to the table in her approach to the job.
“I work for a CAO (chief administrative officer) who thanks me for doing my job,” DeBastiani said. “I’ve not always experienced that in my career. It’s really refreshing to have somebody who listens, thanks me, and puts things in place to help me be more effective in my role.”
“I’m also thankful for having a great team that I work with who are so resilient,” she said. “They go above and beyond for the patients. I am so thankful I have a team like that. Professionally, I couldn’t ask for anything more than a good boss and a good team.”
“I think people are still looking to get that joy back in their heart after all they experienced in the pandemic,” DeBastiani said. “Personally, I’ve worked to let go of things that I can’t control. I think that helps you to be more resilient and see things through a brighter lens. The only reason I went into health care was to help people. Now that I’m giving direct patient care again, I love it.”
As a board member and past president of AHRA, the Association for Medical Imaging Management, DeBastiani is also thankful for the longevity of her professional organization, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year.
“At our annual meeting in July 2023, I was so grateful to see so many of the past AHRA presidents there,” she said. “Many told me that they felt so grateful and so appreciated. Our celebration wasn’t focused to honor just one particular group. We honored our current, past and new members. Everyone felt included, and they felt valued. Whenever we had our gala, it brought our AHRA staff, design team, and board so much joy to bring something that our members could appreciate too. Our celebration was very special, and I am so honored to have been a part of it.”
