It’s 3:00am, and we’re at a gas station ninety miles outside of the park. We’ve been up for twenty-two hours, and been on the road for sixteen of them. I pull out of the station and on to the open road. We roll the windows down and open the sunroof. The air hits my arms and my body shivers at the cold. I stick my left hand out the window and open my palm to the night—it keeps me awake.

The interstate takes us through a Navajo reservation. It’s time to switch drivers, but there are no exits. Daniel slows from eighty and stops us on the wide shoulder next to dark grassland and a wire fence. I pull down the ceiling flap and open the mirror. My eyes are red. Sand from the dunes scratched them up, and the burn of the open windows left me squinting. When I rub them, little tears form at the corners and slide down my cheeks.

The first three hours of the drive are easy. Daniel takes us out of government land, and we watch the sun set behind clouds that drop streaks of rain over the prairie. Although we had already been in the car for nearly ten hours before leaving the dunes, the adrenaline keeps us comfortable. I lean my seat back and put my feet on the dash until it is time to switch. My right hand grips the steering wheel and I rest my foot just above the brake in case my eighty mile-per-hour pace becomes too fast.

I see the sign for “White Sands National Monument” from the passenger seat of the car. These milky white dunes are surrounded by government land used for missile tests and military operations, while the Parks Service protects a small patch in the middle. Entrance is free with our Annual Pass, and we cruise down the road of packed sand towards the far edge of the park. We see families sledding down the hills of sand on circular disks and couples eating sandwiches at park benches. We stop at the visitor center and buy a backcountry camping pass for one night.

I had always been a sick child. I can remember constantly calling my parents from the nurse’s office. While sitting in the nurse’s office I found myself wondering what was wrong with me, and why everyone in the school office knew me by my first name. I was that kid.

Outgoing Patient Advisory Council (PAC) Co-Chairs - Jennie David and Sami Kennedy, who co-wrote "What We Wish Our Parents Knew" - have announced their successors! Alex Jofriet, who is committed to turning his Crohn's diagnosis into a light for others to follow and Bianca Siedlaczek, who is excited to continue her patient advocacy career with ImproveCareNow. Keep reading for personal introductions from the new PAC co-chairs!

Meet Alex Jofriet!

Hi, my name is Alex. I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease at age nine. It took many years, about eight after diagnosis, for me to find remission. At diagnosis, I was one of those shy, studious kids who sat in the classroom, mostly invisible to my peers and I liked that. My diagnosis of Crohn’s Disease threatened that invisibility and it took me about five years to accept my disease and open up about what I was going through.

Now, looking back, that seems like long forgotten history as I have gone from wanting to be invisible to being involved in many advocacy endeavors. My involvement in advocacy led me to ImproveCareNow (ICN), which I have been involved in for the past 4 years. What has kept me involved with ICN is their focus on the whole IBD patient. As co-chair, I hope to add to this "whole patient" focus by increasing the amount of peer support for patients in the network through a universal mentoring system. I am appreciative of all ICN has done and continues to do and am super excited to get started!

Meet Bianca Siedlaczek!

Hi, my name is Bianca! I was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease about 7 years ago, when I was 9 years old. In the past 7 years, I have been through many hospitalizations, many flares, one surgery, one year of remission, and much more. Every one of my experiences with Crohn’s Disease, through the years, has facilitated the growth of my passion for being a patient advocate. Over the past year and a half, ImproveCareNow has given me the chance to fulfill my passion for being an advocate. From the beginning, when I came to my first Learning Session with my center in Michigan, I  loved what ICN was doing to improve patient care and how the network went about doing so.

I look forward to transitioning from being a patient scholar to becoming one of the Patient Advisory Council’s Co-chairs. I am beyond excited to take this next step in my “advocacy career.” I cannot wait to continue working alongside the many centers involved with ICN and ICN’s staff. To say the least I am very excited to get started!

--

The Patient Advisory Council (PAC) brings together patient advocates in ImproveCareNow as partners to create a network for pediatric IBD patient engagement. They create, co-create, and advise the creation of innovations to facilitate improvement in pediatric IBD care and quality of life for children and young adults living with IBD. The PAC welcomes passionate young adult patients (14 years and older) to join. To learn more or join please email [email protected]

Samantha Kennedy - outgoing Patient Advisory Council ("Pack") Co-Chair - is heading off to medical school in the Fall. In an inspirational message to Community Conference attendees - and indeed the whole ImproveCareNow Community - she thanks everyone for working within ImproveCareNow and for believing we can make a difference together. And she reminds us that our work (with patients specifically, and in general) may not be easy or quick or tidy, but 'it is the future, and we need to be the same sort of brave you ask patients to be as we pave that road.'

Sami's words are inspiration on-tap. Enjoy!

This is not a goodbye.

Yes, I will be a student at Cooper Medical School in the fall. Yes, Jennie and I are transitioning the Patient Advisory Council into the hands of wiser, brighter, and as it so happens, younger colleagues. Yet, this is not a goodbye. I have little doubt you will agree: once you are a part of ImproveCareNow, you are always part of ImproveCareNow. As I enter medical school, I question how I can best serve as both a patient advocate and a medical student. I know only this for certain: I cannot imagine practicing in a system without ImproveCareNow and similar networks I hope will be just as successful for other conditions. We are not only creating health for kids with inflammatory bowel diseases; this is making the whole system healthier.

By name, we are a curriculum. We are a learning health network, a network – learning – together. I think it is easy to forget what that means - that we’re all students. If I have been brought up through the education system correctly, as I hope I have as a soon-to-be-graduating senior, being a student is not about getting everything right every time. Students try. Students revise. Students experience. Students have open and engaged minds that recognize success not as a thing but as a method. We are students. We are a learning health network.

When I first started co-chairing the PAC, I really strongly believed we needed to build a model framework for the engagement of patients in a learning health network. Jennie and I took the PAC and restructured it into task forces. We are distributing leadership. We are increasing intra-PAC participation. We are concentrating our resources on developing sustainable task forces, on developing leaders. We are increasing our collaboration with your care centers throughout the network, finding ways we can help each other. We are trying to foster and amplify the voices of not only PAC members, but patients throughout the network. We are establishing a project management structure. We are clarifying guidelines for what active membership means. We are piloting a recruitment program. We are PDSA-ing what ideal patient engagement here at Community Conferences should resemble.

I do not like how those sentences begin. “We are” as a phrase signifies something that is ongoing, not something that is done. As students, researchers, and leaders, we like progress and conclusions. It can feel to me that some of the work we are engaging in is continuing indefinitely.

In our case, however, “we are” is a phrase of success. We are lasting. We are continuing. We are making changes, which lead to other changes, hence prompting more changes.
We are changing the paradigm. In 2013, the Patient Advisory Council was a Facebook group. Today, we are present on multiple network-wide communication platforms and building a presence within care centers. In 2013, we were trying to fit into interventions, to carve out corners and spaces and places we could fit. Today, we are co-creating our own innovations; you are allowing us to co-create yours because you see the value in that. We are challenging the paradigm of how patients and clinicians should interact. In 2013, patients and parents were a minority here. Today, we are here in force. We are fifteen patients. Fifty percent of the PAC is here this weekend. That has never happened before. In 2013, we were acquaintances, colleagues. Today, I call many of you friends and mentors - we talk about mentoring so often here just in the peer-to-peer patient sense, and that is a huge deal, but we are a community of mentors. I don’t know if we recognize that explicitly enough. We are learning in a network, we are learning not only from each other but with each other.

Very rarely will our work end with a hard stop, but that would be the wrong measure by which to judge ourselves and our success. A hard stop would only indicate failure, that we have stopped approaching barriers creatively and stopped challenging ourselves, so that we can go no further. To be a learning health network, I believe we are held to the same standards as all ideal students. We try and we do not give up, even when we want to, even when our work feels tedious, even when we feel as if we are is not enough, even when we feel as if we are achieving little. If we measure ourselves by growth and not an endpoint, we see ourselves as a community in a clearer light.

We are ImproveCareNow. I am ImproveCareNow, and I am really enthusiastically proud of that. I cannot wait to carry that to Cooper with me and beyond and see where it takes all of us. Thank you for working within ImproveCareNow, and for believing that we make a difference together. Please go home and believe in your own patients and believe they can help you go further. It may not be easy or quick or tidy - like some of us really like - but it is the future, and we need to be the same sort of brave you ask patients to be as we pave that road.

If we stop believing patients and families matter in care, our magic as a collaborative will be lost. We celebrate our successes not because failures do not happen, but because when we keep trying and trying and trying, we succeed. It may feel like magic, but it is we are just people – believing –together.

Out of all the talks at the ImproveCareNow Spring 2015 Community Conference none made my heart beat a little faster quite like those delivered by Patient Advisory Council Co-chairs Sami Kennedy and Jennie David. The ability of these two ladies to shine a light directly at the heart and soul of ImproveCareNow is uncanny and uplifting. I challenge anyone reading this, Jennie's speech, to not break into a face-splitting grin (and/or run right out to change the world).

For anyone momentarily struggling with the thankless monotony of changing the healthcare system - I would prescribe the following: read a speech at bedtime and resume improving care now in the morning. Repeat as needed for maximum benefit.

They're a bit long so I've shared Jennie's speech below and will share Sami's in a separate post. Enjoy!

There is a cold tradition in medicine of an unaccommodating hierarchy, where the doctor is installed as the superior and the patient as the inferior. Under the mechanical demeanor of navigating such medical appointments, the whole thing – being exclusively a patient or a doctor, sick or healthy, needing or giving – seems ridiculous and illogical. Outside the sanitized walls of the hospital, I am a person complete with hopes and fears, and yet inside a hospital room – moreover, on an exam table – I am a specimen of my disease, a list of medications, a compilation of surgical scars. There’s a marked lack of apologies or prerequisites for doctors to perform examinations, ask invading and uncomfortable questions, and inflexibly dictate treatment, the flimsy but bold idea that it was all just ‘good business’ woven throughout it all.

I fought against this notion of paternalistic care throughout my pediatric care, routinely clashing with my doctor, the tense encounters punctuated by his passive aggressive sighs and sometimes me crying. I believed in the idea of doctors, patients, and parents working together, but it was much like a wish over birthday candles than anything I knew existed in reality. I kept this starry-eyed but unrealized medical vision in mind, and was consistently underwhelmed and disappointed in medical care that failed to detect my soul within my diseased body as the years swept by.

And then I – quite literally – stumbled across ImproveCareNow. Admittedly, I was enchanted with notion of such a collaborative network, but it somehow seemed too saccharine, too futuristic, too implausible. Having been a patient advocate for several years before discovering ICN, I was used to fulfilling the token patient role, saying token patient things, and – ultimately – doing the limited token patient things. But there is nothing token, ordinary, or suffocating about being a patient advocate within this network. This network is filled with sincerity, generosity, creativity, curiosity, and a desperate and passionate drive to improve things right this very moment for children and families living with IBD. The insatiable appetite for research, quality improvement, and innovative collaborations was infectious, and – while I can remember the extensive exhaustion after my first Learning Session – what I remember more is my heart racing with excitement realizing the remarkable gravity the network can have on pediatric IBD.

New traditions began to solidify: being asked for my opinion by established researchers and the allowance of a pause to actually absorb and respect my answer, the verbal and instrumental encouragement to actualize projects I’d dreamt of, being on a first name basis with clinicians I was so starry-eyed around that I had to force myself not to ask for autographs on manuscripts, and having an undisputedly important place at the table in the conversation for the evolution of quality, patient-centered, collaborative care. I also have to acknowledge the wealth of community-driven traditions: suitcases packed to the brim with candy, repurposing Taylor Swift’s “We’re Never Ever Getting Back Together” as an ode to my long lost colon, and corralling clinicians to take pictures with Flat Jennie.

The words “thank you” will never be enough, and I know that, and wish I could come up with some brilliantly poetic phrase to aptly articulate my profound, profound, profound gratitude. I am thankful for the collective kindness of everyone in this room, the extraordinary opportunities that have been so undeservedly yet continually offered, the patience, humility, and willingness to listen to my ideas and experiences, the faith that has been loaned to allow projects to develop, and the utterly bottomless generosity afforded to me that I have been so unimaginably honored to have received.

“Thank you” is not enough, in part because it is not, in and of itself, action. Instead, I will promise this: I promise to embody the spirit of ICN as I move throughout my psychology doctorate training, when I enter the field of pediatric psychology as a professional, and with every human being I encounter, be it in the hospital or on a street corner. I promise to play a role in the cultural revolution that is innovative collaborative care, to be proud and firm in constructing the values-informed medical traditions of tomorrow, and to help set the world on fire with the formidable (onerous) but righteous idea that clinicians, patients, and parents should stand shoulder to shoulder in medical care.

I have seen and felt the unparalleled power of this network, I have witnessed how kindness changes the world, I have been so humbled, fortified, and impassioned by sharing the vision of collaborative, personalized, and humanistic medicine with all of you. It is a cultural revolution, it is a new tradition, and it is something I am so very, very, very honored to have been a part of.

A record seven gutsy patient advocates in ICN's Patient Advisory Council - PAC, "pack" - attended the Community Conference. We tweeted live at #ICNCC15s all the way through - so please check out our feed!!

The Patient Voice is already strong on Twitter. For a week leading up to the conference, Alex, Bianca, Christian, Isabelle, Jennie, Randa, and I tweeted once a day to provide a glimpse into how IBD factors (or does not factor, in some cases) into our days. We made special reference to the key drivers of remission took center stage at the Community Conference and form the foundation of ImproveCareNow's work:





Jennie described challenges that impede her access to and communication with her doctor.

Randa described how proactive care allowed her to take better control of her ulcerative colitis.

Alex questioned why it can be so hard to find the right medication - and shared his optimism that more accurate diagnoses and research can change the game!



Bianca shared how less-than-optimal nutritional intake has impacted her - and made it difficult for her to grow at the same rate as her peers.

Isabelle emphasized the relevance of compassionate care to psychosocial health.

Finally, Christian described how a food journal has improved his ability to self-manage his IBD.

And, I shared how my pill case makes it easier for me to stay adherent at college and on-the-go!

We hope you'll join the conversation on Twitter now and in the future!