Inside Syllabus - Q&A with Dr. Kathleen Reeves, President and CEO of The Arnold P. Gold Foundation

Inside this Syllabus Edition:

• Q&A with Dr. Kathleen Reeves, President and CEO of The Arnold P. Gold Foundation
• Welcome to AACN's 2024-2025 Conference Season
• Submit your Abstract for an Upcoming AACN Conference
• AACN Call for Nominations
• Transform Your Curriculum with Competency-Based Education
• TIGER: Genomic Training for Doctoral Nurses
• AACN's Leadership Networks
• Opportunities and More

Read the full Syllabus Newsletter here

Q&A with Dr. Kathleen Reeves

How did your career in health care prepare you to champion the mission of the Gold Foundation

Connecting with people on a personal, human level has always been important to me. It’s why I became a pediatrician. I spent most of my career in North Philadelphia at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University. I worked in medical education as well as with the local community on population health research. Over that time, I had an opportunity to learn from the very best teachers I have ever encountered — patients and students — and they helped me develop my outlook on what needs to be prioritized in healthcare. First, no matter how amazing the science behind healthcare is, optimal health doesn’t happen unless people experience care that trustworthy, safe, and kind. We see this everyday especially in distressed communities like North Philadelphia. The pandemic made it even more obvious. We can have the most amazing vaccine that protects us from what can be a deadly infection, but it has no real value for people who don’t feel safe or can’t trust healthcare professionals enough to receive it. I did not witness a great degree of vaccine hesitancy; what I saw was a clear lack of trust.

The people of North Philadelphia showed me how trust, safety, and kindness in healthcare doesn’t just happen — it requires intentionality, knowledge, skill, and hard work. An innate sense of caring for other people is essential for any student coming into the healthcare landscape, but that alone is not enough. The skills and knowledge needed to engender trust and compassion can, and must, be taught. I was first drawn to the Gold Foundation years ago because of its mission of humanism in healthcare for all, a mission I deeply believe in. I became a member of the Gold Humanism Honor Society and served as the founding advisor at the chapter at Lewis Katz School of Medicine. I knew the ethos of the nonprofit and appreciated its values. This position felt like an opportunity to take the work I was already doing around connection and compassion, bring it to a national level, and make a bigger difference. In many ways, it felt like coming home.

In your first year as President and CEO, did anything surprise you?

I have known about the Gold Foundation and its movement of humanism in healthcare for years, but I was surprised to really experience the vast community and enthusiastic partners across the nation — including our wonderful partners in nursing at AACN. I have been so energized by the sense of community around the importance of humanism in medicine. The stakeholders who are committed to making healthcare more human-centered are amazing researchers, nurses, doctors, administrators, students, leaders, and educators. And the number of committed stakeholders is large. We are very well positioned in healthcare to bring great change.

How do you define humanism in health care?

Humanism in healthcare has three components: trust, safety, and kindness. People often experience healthcare when they are in their most vulnerable moments. Healthcare can be hard to understand. The collision of these facts requires trust to move past the vulnerability. Science is not something that we can trust. We can only trust people. Science is often complex and, by definition, it is ever-changing. We must trust the people who are using science to help alleviate suffering. Healing also requires safety. Suffering and poor health are scary. Fear and the physiologic changes that go along with it prevent health. Any human-centered healthcare requires a feeling of safety. And finally, humanistic clinicians must be driven by kindness, by a sense of caring for their patients, their colleagues, and themselves.

Why is compassion a catalyst for healing?

Compassion is what motivates us as humans to care about each other. Patients know when the nurse or other healthcare professional in front of them is motivated by compassion, and this creates trust and safety, encouraging patients to fully participate in their care. Healthcare professionals also know when they are well enough to experience compassion. Caring about others is hard work. We must be healthy ourselves if we ever hope to truly share a compassionate space with patients.

What does the science show about the connection between humanistic care and positive patient outcomes?

Humanism in healthcare is supported by a wealth of evidence proving its positive impact on patient outcomes. Research consistently shows that when healthcare professionals practice humanism, patients feel safer, trust more fully, share higher levels of satisfaction, have better treatment adherence, and experience improved clinical outcomes. Studies have shown that when patients feel like their healthcare professional really cares about them, patients experience less anxiety and more trust, and feel empowered to positively impact their health. This therapeutic alliance is crucial for effective healthcare delivery. We also know through research that healthcare spaces that are seen as compassionate and humanistic contribute to a more supportive and collaborative healthcare environment. This leads to a better functioning, interprofessional healthcare team that is able to provide more effective care. When nurses and other healthcare professionals prioritize humancentered care, a more holistic approach to disease is realized.

Why is it important to strengthen the connection between medicine and nursing?

One of my favorite authors, who is a pediatrician and ethicist, once referred to healthcare as an orchestra in which each discipline plays a different instrument and the patient serves as the conductor. The music doesn’t happen unless the strings play well with the brass and the drums coordinate with the woodwinds. No matter how much technology advances and how integral artificial intelligence becomes to healthcare, nothing will replace how the people who are the nurses and doctors and the other healthcare professionals interact with the people who are the patients. For the music of healthcare to happen, healthcare professionals must work together like an orchestra, each realizing the other brings an equal and important sound to the story.

What are some of the Gold Foundation’s major programs?

The Gold Foundation’s most well-known program is the White Coat Ceremony, an iconic rite of passage for students that centers on an oath to humanistic patient care. Our Co-Founder and namesake, Dr. Arnold P. Gold, envisioned the ritual as a way of emphasizing the importance of the human connection to students early in their training. The first ceremony of humanism supported by the Gold Foundation began in 1993 for medical schools, and in 2014, the Gold Foundation and AACN launched a partnership to bring the ceremony to nursing schools. Today, hundreds of nursing schools hold White Coat Ceremonies, though they may call them by different names, such as Nursing Oath Ceremonies, and adapt the event for their school’s unique identity. The Gold Foundation supports, in total across nursing, medical, and other healthcare profession schools, more than 50,000 students participating each year in a memorable ceremony focused on humanism. We provide free pins that feature the Gold mobius loop, a symbol of the bond between a clinician and a patient, and other materials. Learn more on our White Coat Ceremony webpage.

Here are a few other Gold programs:

• Dr. Hope Babette Tang Humanism in Healthcare Essay Contest, an annual contest for nursing and medical students that prompts them to reflect on a healthcare experience where humanism was at the center. The winning essays are published in the Journal of Professional Nursing, AACN’s journal, and Academic Medicine, the journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). We very much appreciate AACN’s support of the essay contest and collaboration in expanding this program to nursing students.
• Gold Humanism Honor Society, which is an honor society based in medical schools and focused on humanism. More than 48,000 physicians and medical students are members, including the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, and more than 180 chapters hold activities to support humanism.
• Tell Me More®, a communications tool to help the healthcare team get to know a patient beyond their diagnosis.
• Gold Humanism Summit, our annual conference, which will next be held in Baltimore, Sept. 17-20, 2025. We would love for nurses, educators, and nursing students to join us! Our call for abstracts is open now.

What teaching resources does the Gold Foundation provide to help educators prepare compassionate caregivers?

We offer many resources for educators, and we plan to grow this area tremendously in the years to come. In partnership with NextGenU.org, we offer two online courses: Humanism in Health and Healthcare and Dismantling Structural Racism to Advance Health Equity. These courses are completely free and available to nurses, nursing students, and all healthcare team members around the world. Our Gold Resource Library offers a wide variety of resources designed to help foster the human connection in healthcare. It features both Gold Foundation resources and materials from our partners or other organizations. And our Gold Humanism Summit is always packed with practical takeaways for educators — as well as a wonderful opportunity to connect with an amazing community of people who care about humanism in healthcare.

How can nurses and nurse educators help advance the mission of the Gold Foundation?

We would love to have more nurses and nurse educators collaborating with us to advance humanism in healthcare for all. Here are a few ways you can join our work:

• Attend our Gold Humanism Summit on Sept. 17-20, 2025 and/or apply to be involved as a speaker, poster presenter, or artwork exhibitor. Our call for abstracts is open now.
• Sign up for our monthly News & Notes newsletter for the latest updates.
• Speak up at your institution about the importance of humanism in healthcare, how it helps support patient, clinician, and even organizational health.
• Encourage your institution to join the Gold Partners Council, a group of leading hospitals and medical schools that support the mission of humanism in healthcare for all.
• Reach out to me at kreeves@goldfoundation.org to share your interest in getting involved. We will be looking for collaborators in creating new courses and many other projects in the years to come. I’d love to hear from you.

What do you see on the horizon for Gold Foundation in the next 10 years?

I am so excited for the future of the Gold Foundation and the movement of humanism in healthcare. We are currently in the process of creating our next Strategic Plan for the Gold Foundation, which will focus on three areas: Humanistic Innovations, Education (especially continuing and interprofessional education), and Community. Humanistic Innovations is all about supporting humanism for patients and clinicians in direct, evidence-based ways. For example, our newest program, Gold Human-Centered Spaces, will transform a clinical site by evaluating multiple aspects, from policies to the environment, and making them more humanistic. Trauma-informed experts will be on site to support the healthcare staff and patients, and the Gold Foundation will measure key metrics before and after the transformation.

We believe that a more humanistic space will result in greater patient satisfaction, increased kept-appointment rates, higher clinician well-being, and even savings for the healthcare institution. Finally, all of our goals for a more humanistic healthcare system depend on partnerships and drawing more attention to our mission at a national level. We are deeply appreciative of the AACN’s collaboration and the great compassion nurses show every day in their care of patients. Together, we can create a future healthcare system that is more humanistic and supportive for both patients and healthcare professionals.