Heart of Safety Coalition Getting to the heart of the matter

  

Caring Greatly podcast

The Caring Greatly podcast is a destination where healthcare leaders and other listeners are inspired to grow, lead, innovate and drive industry transformation. This award-winning, interview-style podcast creates space for people to share their perspective and connect to human-centered stories that reveal solutions, spark innovation and provide hope for a safer and brighter future of care.

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Lauren Muñoz, PhD, RN, FNP-BC
01.27.2026

Safety and wellbeing transformation through the Workplace Change Collaborative – Lauren Muñoz, PhD, RN, FNP-BC

The Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act is a first-of-its-kind law that supports healthcare workers’ mental health and wellbeing. Since its enactment in 2022, the law has helped transform processes, improve systems and save lives. This law and the ongoing work by the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation and its ALL IN Coalition have also helped reduce or eliminate the structural, institutional and cultural barriers that prevent healthcare workers from accessing the mental health care they need and deserve. In this episode of Caring Greatly, podcast host Liz Boehm speaks with Lauren Muñoz, PhD, RN, FNP-BC, a research scientist at The George Washington University’s Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity. Dr. Muñoz is also a member of the technical assistance center that helped coordinate collaboration among the Health Resources and Services Administration grantees under the Dr. Lorna Breen Act. During their conversation, Lauren describes the grantees’ work, the value of a national collaborative driving team member wellbeing in diverse environments, and the impact of enduring resources available for leaders to support system-wide organizational improvements.

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Chris Bundy, MD, MPH, FAPA, FASAM
12.29.2025

Illness does not equal impairment: Why care team members deserve a supportive path back to practice – Chris Bundy, MD, MPH

Having a mental health condition, including depression or substance use disorder, does not automatically mean that a physician, nurse or other healthcare professional is unable to provide patient care in a competent, ethical and professional manner. Chris Bundy, MD, MPH, FAPA, FASAM, and other leaders of state-based professional health programs (PHPs) support physicians and other healthcare professionals as they navigate mental health conditions and help find supportive paths back to practice once their illness is managed. In this episode of Caring Greatly, Dr. Bundy talks about how PHPs work, his involvement with the Washington PHP and the Federation of State PHP. He shares some common misperceptions about mental health and substance use, and why the stress and trauma-exposure inherent with working in healthcare environments may create unique vulnerabilities for care team members. Dr. Bundy explains some of the challenges and limitations of PHPs, and discusses how many programs have expanded their purview to support a broader group of healthcare professionals beyond physicians. Today, many PHPs offer support to pharmacists, dentists, physicians’ assistants and nurses.

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Carlton Abner, DNP, RN, NBC-HWC
11.14.2025

Protecting capacity to learn as a focus of wellbeing – Carlton Abner, DNP, RN, NBC-HWC

What if we could bridge the divide between healthcare leaders who understand that team member safety and wellbeing is essential and those who view it as nice-to-have with a small shift in focus? That’s what happens when Carlton Abner, DNP, RN, NBC-HWC, reframes wellbeing goals as protecting capacity – whether capacity to learn or teach, perform or recover, or empathize and connect. In this episode of Caring Greatly, Dr. Abner shares what it means to protect capacity for students at Kansas City University (KCU), including medical students. He shares how important capacity protection is for a generation of students who want to engage differently in their work, with a strong focus on passion and connection.

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Shannon Phillips, MD, MPH
10.30.2025

Human-centered leadership: Reflections from a quality leader – Shannon Connor Phillips, MD, MBA

A year before the pandemic Shannon Phillips, MD, MPH, and Liz Boehm collaborated on qualitative research to put a framework around human-centered leadership, which they define as a leadership approach that explicitly supports team members’ cognitive, emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing so they can achieve their highest human and healing potential. This approach to leadership was timely given the pandemic soon stretched resources, strained trusted relationships, and stressed bedside team members and leaders to unprecedented levels. Today, leaders continue to work tirelessly to create ideal working environments that support psychological and emotional safety, dignity and inclusion, and physical safety for all team members while still facing staffing shortages as well as high levels of burnout and workplace violence. In this episode of Caring Greatly, Liz and Shannon revisit the mastery model of human-centered leadership in this new context. Shannon shares her views on what’s the same, what has changed, and how leaders can continue to find joy in their work and use that joy to help improve the safety and wellbeing of their teams.

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Sarah-Marie Baumgartner, RN
10.14.2025

Workplace violence prevention and recovery in the emergency department: A nurse’s perspective – Sarah-Marie Baumgartner, RN

In this episode of Caring Greatly, Sarah-Marie Baumgartner, RN, talks about ways nurses can protect themselves in the emergency department (ED )and other healthcare settings and how organizations can reduce the likelihood of both physical and verbal assault on care team members. She shares a pragmatic approach to zero tolerance that focuses not on zero-incidences of violence, but on zero tolerance for a lack of communication, training, resources, policies and procedures to help decrease workplace violence. In all of her work, Sarah-Marie encourages innovation, collaboration and outside-the-box thinking.

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Stefanie Simmons, MD, FACEP, and Corey Feist, JD, MBA
09.26.2025

Six actions to break down barriers and be ALL IN for mental health care

In this episode of Caring Greatly, Corey Feist, Co-founder and CEO, and Stephanie Simmons, MD, FACEP, Chief Medical Officer of the LBF, talk about the work they’ve done and continue to do to remove barriers to mental health care access for healthcare workers. Together, they share results of a new research report published in collaboration with the Heart of Safety Coalition that shows how clinicians perceive structural, institutional and cultural barriers that can prevent them from accessing care. They also discuss six actions organizations and leaders can take to help care team members get access to mental health care without fear of stigma, discrimination or professional repercussions.

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