Ten years ago, my friend and fellow consultant Curt Lindberg attended a workshop we held at Dartmouth on interventional applications of relational coordination (RC), and from there he was off to the races. 

It’s been many months since my last note. I wrote to you previously about my dear sister Nancy who developed a glioblastoma; after two years of remarkable courage and grace, she succumbed in late December. 

Dear friends and colleagues,

As the COVID-19 pandemic escalates all around us, I can’t help but notice how very important relationships are in finding our way through, for both the community at large and people who work in healthcare.

We are all sustained by support and compassion, by feeling that others know us, understand us and care about us. The need for connection is quite literally hard-wired into our neurobiology; our survival as a species has always depended upon it. (Over the last few years I’ve been worrying that our lack of compassion and connection might actually be putting our survival at risk, but that’s a story for another time…) 

Given our shared interest in improving the quality of relationships and culture in healthcare organizations, I thought you might be interested in the article on physicians' trust of one another that I wrote with Rich Frankel and Ginny Tilden. It was just published in JAMA as part of a series of articles about trust in healthcare more generally. The series grew out of a 2018 conference on trust sponsored by the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation.