Keith at beginning_ part 4

The discussion highlights the importance of psychological safety in various environments, particularly in healthcare field work. It emphasizes the significance of creating a safe space for open communication, sharing opinions, and challenging oneself and others. Examples are shared where individuals felt supported to voice concerns and make recommendations, leading to better outcomes for patients. Psychological safety is seen as a balance between feeling comfortable and being challenged for growth, rather than just seeking a stress-free environment. We also love getting to speak with Maria and we really think that her definition of psychological safety hits the nail on the head. Yeah, I think we all have some really great definitions here and I know we have some members in our group here that have some really good examples of both psychologically safe and psychologically unsafe environments that they've been within field work or just the workplace in general. So, Keith, I'd love you to share a little bit first about yours and then we'll kind of move from there. And, you know, in my experience in inpatient rehab, it was kind of, with patients at least, it was kind of a, you can just feel the vibe if they're, you know, not vibing with what you're saying. If they're thinking something but they're not saying it, you can usually tell either through their body language or they, you know, sometimes they may ask kind of vague questions, things like that. They don't exactly know what they're trying to get clarification on. So, that's where you as a practitioner, you need to be able to fill those gaps for them. You need to tell when they're not feeling safe or when they may have a question. You know, what can you do to help foster the environment to where they do feel safe or what can you do to go ahead and speak up to things that you think they may already be thinking? So, I kind of already touched on, you know, you walk into a room and you can tell if there's tension or different things going on. I think that really matters within leadership and followership because if you do not feel safe going to your leader, that definitely will affect your ability to follow them. And I also think you can be in an environment where it's extremely challenging but you have such great team members with the mentality that, all right, we're all in this together and that provides a type of safety that is unmatchable. While I was on the field work, my CI was at UAMS, did a really good job of providing a safe space for me to ask questions but also voice my opinion. I had a lot of freedom with how I treated my patients and what interventions I provided, but she also challenged me to come up with new ones and took what I thought about their progress into account while also asking further in-depth questions. And I really appreciated how she not only gave me space to grow on my own but also prompted questions so that I could think more deeply about things and how she allowed me to struggle a little bit but never let me completely fall. So, I really appreciated that safe space because I felt comfortable in how to grow. But also how to fail. I love that. Okay, so when I think of psychological safety, one example that really comes to my mind on field work was when I was in acute care. I had a really great CI and I always felt safe to communicate with her and kind of share my thoughts and opinions and all that kind of thing. A specific example that comes to mind is when I went to go do an eval on someone that had already had a couple of other therapy evaluations a week or two ago and the other disciplines were recommending home health. But it was just a situation where the patient's mobility was not safe, his environment was not going to be accessible to him once he got home. And as a student, I kind of freaked out while I was in there because I was like, I don't want my name and my CI's name to be on someone's chart and leave a note that says that they're safe for this when they're really not. And I felt safe enough to go to my CI and be like, this is what I saw, this is what I'm thinking and why I think that we need to recommend rehab instead of home health. And she was amazing and listened to me. And because of that, I was able to put rehab on as a recommendation and the patient actually ended up going to rehab and having a stay there to help him become more independent before he went home. So but if I would not have felt like I was in a safe environment to go to my CI and give a recommendation that was contradicting of the other two disciplines, then the outcome may have been very different. And Bella, that really just even went to our introduction and health care scenario. You just lived that out. Yeah, and I would I would echo all these stories. I also had really positive experiences during my field work that were really psychologically safe. And I really I want to go back to something that kind of Megan pointed out, because I think it's important to define this within the psychological safety definition as well. It's not always that. It's, you know, just an easy, breezy environment that you're not challenged. You know, you still need to be challenged. You need to be pushed by others. But you also need to have the space to feel comfortable in doing that and have comfortability and growth from I think Taylor mentioned it earlier, too, from mistakes and things like that. So I think that's a really key thing with psychological safety. Some people might look at that and think, well, you know, I just need to be safe no matter what. I don't need to be challenged. I don't need to be pushed out of my comfort zone. And that's absolutely not the case. You still need those components within that environment. But you just need to feel like you have a safe place to go to talk to somebody to be able to challenge others and to be challenged by others.