So, did you win or lose the Super Bowl pool? And once the euphoria or heartbreak subsided, what kind of Monday morning quarterbacking did you do? If only Patriots receiver Wes Welker hadn’t dropped that pass from Tom Brady! Or, what if Giants’ Mario Manningham’s footwork had been a tad less precise? And what if Ahmad Bradshaw didn’t sit down in the end zone?
During the Super Bowl madness team sports is on everybody’s mind. We admire the players, the coaches, and more than anything, the splendid teamwork. As Dan Hawkins, former coach at Boise State and Colorado, told a New York Times reporter, “This isn’t Football 101. This is like doctorate-level stuff.”In a recent KevinMD blog, Davis Liu, MD, a New England Patriots fan wrote, “There is much to be learned by doctors and others involved in health care from the successful teams and the way they are coached and the way they practice, and the results that become obvious in the way they win.” Liu continued, “Providing complex medical care is like leading a football team of 53 players of which only 11 are on the field at any given time to play offense, defense, or special teams. For success, each individual must do his job consistently and reliably every time.”
So, we asked some sports-loving board certified chaplains to talk with us about team leadership.
Chaplains as Team Players
The Rev. George Handzo, sports fan and senior consultant, chaplaincy care leadership and practice at HealthCare Chaplaincy, said chaplains are trained to be solo practitioners, but that in a code team, “Good chaplains will learn their ‘position’ on these teams including when to get involved and when and how to stay out of the way. Sometimes we get in the game from the beginning like when a family is viewing the code. We have to know our role and be ready to get in the game as needed.”
From Martial Arts to Trauma Team
Chaplain Fran Pultro, who holds Black Belts in all the martial arts, is a one-person pastoral care department and part of the multi-person level one trauma team at St. Christopher’s Children’s Hospital in North Philadelphia. A few weeks ago, he was paged at home late at night and rushed to the hospital when a shooting that began over an altercation on Facebook, took the lives of three 14-year-olds and a 16-year-old, two already dead when he arrived. “It’s my job to do pastoral intervention for the families,” said Pultro, describing the chaotic scene. The medical staff didn’t know about the families, as they were working to save the life of the third teen. There was information coming from every different angle,” he said, and as a result a great deal of misinformation. “I began making phone calls,” he said and making course corrections as he worked. “I became the clearing house for information.” Pultro also still teaches martial arts and said he still gets on the mat with his students, because “if they don’t think you can do it yourself, they won’t listen to you.”
From Quarter Back to ER Team
Chaplain Malcolm Marler directs a 20-person pastoral care department at the University of Alabama Medical Center in Birmingham. Born in Selma, Marler learned about teamwork as a defensive quarter back (corner back) for Clemson University and was team captain in his senior year. “I grew up wanting to play with Bear Bryant, like every kid in Alabama did,” he said about the legendary coach. But they didn’t give scholarships then to poor kids like me.” When he took over as director of the pastoral care department at UAB in 2009, Marler applied this kind of team training. Previously chaplains worked either the day or the night shift and those shifts never met. Marler changed it so that everybody worked some of both shifts. “This is a big place with 1,000 plus patients,” he said. “The ER is a huge operation and we have 12 ICUs.” His department includes eight staff chaplains and one CPE supervisor along with support staff.
From Swim Team to Pastoral Care Team
Chaplain Sara Hester, who works with Marler, and is assigned to several services including ED, Trauma, and Trauma Burns, said it was her years of experience on a swim team that taught her the importance of teamwork. She was the breast stroke person but you had to watch for the back stroker, and know when to dive in or get out of the way. “It’s important to have that good hand off.” Hester said her trauma team in ED has excellent doctors and nurses. “I go around and introduce myself; I make regular rounds.” She illustrated the effectiveness of the team with an incident involving the chief trauma doctor who is “a bit gruff” and had upset the patient’s family. That physician immediately called Hest er and asked her to go and appease them. “She knew she needed me,” Hester said. “It was a good handoff.”
This is a condensed version of a more comprehensive article that originally ran in HealthCare Chaplaincy’s PlainViews, the online professional journal for chaplains and other spiritual care providers. To read the entire article, go to http://plainviews.healthcarechaplaincy.org.
Marian Betancourt is the associate editor of PlainViews and the author of Playing Like a Girl: Transforming Our Lives with Team Sports published by McGraw-Hill in 2001 and brought back into print by iUniverse.
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