Ep. 78: Caring for Our Children is Caring for Ourselves with Dr. Kurt Newman- Surgeon, Author, and President and CEO of Children’s National Hospital

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Dr. Kurt Newman came to Children’s National Hospital in 1984 to do a surgical fellowship, and now 36 years later, is the President and CEO of the hospital. Dr. Newman is also a professor at the George Washington University School of Medicine, and is also the author of the book, Healing Children, whose proceeds go to the Pediatric Health Opportunity Fund. Before acting as President and CEO, Dr. Newman served as the Surgeon-in-Chief and Senior Vice President for the Joseph E. Robert, Jr., Center for Surgical Care at the hospital. Dr. Newman is also a strong advocate for expanding mental health access for kids, and as President and CEO has focused on patient and family centered care. Dr. Newman quotes the great Nelson Mandela by echoing, “The true character of a society is revealed in how it treats its children.”

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Show Notes

[01:43] Again, through an open mind situation where I had an opportunity because I had a thyroid cancer and needed surgery for that. And the surgeon I met just changed my whole view of what surgery was all about. And I decided through that experience, I want to go into surgery.
[02:52] I became chief of surgery and was just loving my career as a surgeon and had this crazy opportunity eight years ago to become the CEO of the hospital and put a lot of the things I'd learned, being a surgeon and caring for patients, put that into place on a larger scale all across the hospital.
[04:10] There's so many ways to think about children and their resilience and how we can take advantage of that.
[04:43] If you think about the mind and children, they are really resilient if we give them the opportunity to be resilient. That's what's so much fun sometimes to work with children because they're fresh, they're optimistic. They have this love of life in America. They just don't even know some of the negative sayings that we as adults are already internalizing, they have this fresh approach. So we try to take advantage of that at a hospital like Children's, where you want to have art, music, clowns, a fun environment and take advantage of this resilience. I truly believe that that helps healing. And people might say to me sometimes, how can you work at a children's hospital? Must be really depressing. All these terrible, difficult stories. And if you've ever been at a children's hospital, it's anything but. It's alive and it's fresh and there's colors reflecting children. So we want to take advantage of that resilience to help healing.
[06:00] A lot of times I'd get phone calls from people I knew, friends. They were in situations with their children or a baby or something where if they knew what I knew, they wouldn't be in that situation. But there was no way for them to know what I know.
[07:07] I've made it part of my advocacy because I think you want to focus on your children. They're our future. Too often the policies approaches don't reflect our needs to invest in children.
[07:56] One big silver lining, though, is that the virus itself, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to affect children medically as much as it does adults.
[08:22] I think a second dimension of it is the mental stress that families change their entire lives. And kids are not going through their normal routines and are at home and not in school and not seeing their friends. And we've seen an increase in stress and even in things as sad as child abuse because of pressures on families now. And so we're trying to think holistically as we come out of this that, yes, we may have the medical side of this taken care of, but how are we going to deal with all of the impact that is happening?
[09:42] If you divorce this from that incredible tragedy that's happening right now, I think there's a lot of reason to be optimistic that we're going to defeat it. And I think that's going to happen very, very quickly.
[10:58] In terms of pediatrics, we're leading the way in with a campus like this.
[11:57] This unintentional trauma, accidents, were the leading cause of injury and death in children.
[12:15] So thinking about preventing the injuries was the vaccine that would then eliminate these types of injuries. He created something called Safe Kids, which is a nonprofit organization that focused on things like bicycle helmets or child restraints and all of these things. You've seen the impact of all of that work was a great way of framing up a real health threat. And then how people could work on it and work on it at the grassroots level.
[13:09] When the American people get on to something, they can get it solved. And, you know, I think that's true here in this crisis, too. Sometimes you just have to look to the kids to help lead the adults. I love all these videos of kids telling the adults what to do.
[15:05] You don't want to do anything that is going to be irreversible when you're looking at a complex problem like that for this baby. You want to do just enough because, you know, you can come back in the future and you don't want to do anything that's going to compromise what you might need to do in the future.
[16:24] And it's something that stuck with me forever about not just focusing on the technical sides of the operations and what we needed to do, but also be thinking about the whole situation and what that baby needed. You know, that's the beauty of nurses, is that they think that way all the time. That's the way they're taught. They come up through it. And learn to be successful in my role now as CEO of a hospital is not only listen to the mothers, but also listen to the nurses.
[17:05] But this kid was such a fighter and so courageous and just persevered and never say die, that he got through all of that. So I didn't know I would be at his high school graduation. I didn't know he'd go to college. I didn't know he'd ever have a girlfriend, you know, because all the operation he had. And not only did he have a girlfriend, he got engaged and just married the most wonderful young woman, Jessie, and I was at the wedding. I've never cried more intensely.
[18:32] In my mind what made them great was a lot of their personal qualities and how they transcended their medical practice and had an impact in the community.
[18:52] And there's hundreds of doctors like that, if not thousands. And you just see the impact and the relationships they have with the families that they take care of and how they're looked to for advice. And a lot of it's not the medical side of it, but it's just how to live life.
[19:09] It's just not enough to be a great technical surgeon or do operations and understand the science of it. But you got to understand the people. And don't be afraid to become friends with your patients. And don't be afraid to take care of people that are your friends."
[20:46] So in many ways, you know, Healing Children, but this book was also about there were a lot of healing things for me.
[20:51] One thing I learned, and I have to push myself on this all the time, is to put yourself in other people's shoes, and to think about the experience that they're having with the doctor through the eyes of the child or the parents.
[21:15] So when I had just become CEO and I had this idea that I wanted to have at the top a doctor and a nurse as the leaders of the hospital, I just thought that that was going to really send a message. This isn't about a business. This is really about taking care of patients and putting the children and family at the center of things.
[22:26] And I think that's what is so helpful about my own experiences having been a patient and been in situations and then think about what was going on from the patient perspective
[22:46] I mean, just the courage of people right now in working in these hospitals, we're testing lots of children. There's a sense that there's a virus out there and some of the children are sick. And our doctors, nurses and it's not just the doctors and nurses, the women and men that clean the hospital are exposed to the same worries and concerns. And they've got families at home. You know, it's just a great time to check in with how wonderful people are.
[23:28] And so there's a lot of silver linings here, as awful as things are. I think they're all emerge from this stronger.
[24:06] I think that there's a certain stigma still to mental and behavioral health and issues around that. But it's so common and it's right there in front of us, that people just don't like to talk about it or share that the way they do medical illness.
[24:24] You know, about 20 percent of children will have some type of mental or behavioral health issues during their lifetime.
[24:54] And my perspective on that was all the people that would call me and they'd have an issue with their child and they couldn't get help. They didn't know where to go or to find help. And as I started trying to navigate with them and for them, I realized just how few resources there were and how hard it was for people to find what was needed. And even other things like how little research was being done in that area or how few psychiatrists there were just for children.
[26:25] And if you take autism, for example, that I've really tried to focus on, it may be a thousand different diseases or problems that have all been lumped together. Well, that makes it hard to do research because it could be that we need to think very differently specifically about the thousand that are lumped together before we can make progress.
[26:58] I think when someone first identifies that there's an issue with a child to the time that they're diagnosed at seven to eight years on average. I mean, think about all the things we could be doing during that seven to eight years to help that child and family and how much we could improve things by that type of early intervention.
[27:24] There's a lot of things we can be doing research and interventions with babies or maybe even before children are born that will have long term implications for those children. But also, I think may have a big impact on adult diseases like cancer.
[27:52] And that's what I love about Children's National is we're the children's hospital in our Nation's Capital. And we have a chance to not only as special as it is taking care of kids and families that are here, but also impact things on a bigger scale.
[28:53] It really is about having mentors that can guide you along and then you see the possibilities.
[30:48] But Nelson Mandela had a saying, "the true character of a society is revealed in how it treats its children."

Thank you for joining us on Health Gig. We loved having you with us. We hope you'll tune in again next week. In the meantime, be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast, and follow us on healthgigpod.com.

“This isn't about a business. This is really about taking care of patients and putting the children and family at the center of things.” - Dr. Kurt Newman
“One thing I learned, and I have to push myself on this all the time, is to put yourself in other people's shoes, and to think about the experience that they're having with the doctor through the eyes of the child or the parents.” - Dr. Kurt Newman
“Don’t be afraid to become friends with your patients, and don’t be afraid to take care of people that are your friends.” - Dr. Kurt Newman

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