Children's Hospitals Today - Winter 2018 - 29

5 MINUTES WITH... / VITALS

EVENTS
REGISTER TODAY: QUALITY
AND SAFETY CONFERENCE
Registration for the 2018
Quality and Safety in
Children's Health Conference
is open. Join other health
care professionals March 5-7
in San Diego to learn about
solutions to improve pediatric
outcomes. Session topics
include fostering safety,
advancing patient and family
engagement, building clinical
effectiveness and managing
children's health care.

DON'T MISS THIS
FEATURED SPEAKER
James Bagian, M.D., P.E., is
an astronaut turned patient
safety expert. As the director
of the Center for Healthcare
Engineering and Patient
Safety at the University of
Michigan, he applies systems
engineering approaches
to enhance patient safety.
Bagian was the founding
director of the Veteran's
Administration (VA) National
Center for Patient Safety and
the VA's first chief patient
safety officer, where he
developed safety-related
tools and programs that
have been adopted nationally
and internationally.

Learn more and register
for the Quality and Safety in
Children's Health Conference
at childrenshospitals.org/
quality18.

Sian Beilock
Here's what a leading brain researcher has learned
about improving human performance while in
high-pressure situations.

ian Beilock, Ph.D., president of Barnard
College in New York, studies the science behind why people choke in highpressure situations. At the 2018 Quality and
Safety in Children's Health Conference,
Beilock will explain how to help team
members perform at their best. She is the
author of Choke: The Secret to Performing
Under Pressure.
Can anyone use your research to improve
their performance? We are all inherently
interested in this phenomenon of choking because it happens to all of us. We are
not born chokers or thrivers; we learn.
There are all sorts of situations where the
pressure is on, or people are watching us
and we don't put our best foot forward.
My research suggests there are ways
to work on that and do better in those
important situations.
Why does this topic interest you? People always ask me if I do a little bit of me-search
in addition to research. I've always been interested in why I sometimes performed at
my best and why I sometimes didn't. I was
an athlete growing up and was interested
in how I performed on the soccer field,
when I took important tests or when I had
to do something when all eyes were on me.

What is something people would be surprised to learn about you? I'm interested
in some of the reasons I choked in my life.
I learned that what happens in our heads
matters. The mental game matters, and
we often don't focus on that as much. We
focus on learning the material or getting
a skill down. But how we think about others and whether others are watching us,
or how we think about whether we can
succeed, changes whether or not we really
do succeed.

What suggestions do you have for people
to perform their best under stress?
Practice under the same conditions that
you are going to perform under. If you have
to perform under time pressure where people are watching you, practice that way. If
you have to give a talk, practice in front of
other people, or in front of a mirror, to get
used to the self-consciousness you might
feel when you're speaking.

How can people in the health care industry
benefit from your research on anxiety? A
lot of the tips and tools that I talk about in
my book Choke, and in the work I do, apply
across pressure-filled situations. Whether
it's in the boardroom or in a hospital dealing with people in stressful situations,
understanding what happens in the brain
and body can help us perform better.
-Christine Bush

CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL S TODAY Winter 2018

http://www.childrenshospitals.org/quality18 http://www.childrenshospitals.org/quality18

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Children's Hospitals Today - Winter 2018