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Pediatrics

UCLA Health clinic helps ensure survivors of pediatric and … – UCLA Health Connect

Each year, about 15,000 children and adolescents in the United States receive the terrifying diagnosis that they have cancer.

The vast majority about 85% will survive, thanks to dramatic improvements in treatment over the last several decades. But with that comes another challenge: meeting the need for longer-term follow-up, to address the wide range of issues survivors may face either as a result of their cancer or the specific treatment they received.

Thats where UCLAs Pediatric and Adolescent Survivorship Clinic comes in.

When Jacqueline Casillas, MD, a pediatric oncologist, founded the clinic 20 years ago, the number of survivors was much smaller, and having a clinic dedicated to meeting their long-term needs was a new concept.

Now, though, there are about 500,000 survivors of pediatric, adolescent and young-adult cancers, according to data from the National Cancer Institutes Childhood Cancer Registry. The focus has expanded beyond keeping patients from succumbing to their initial cancer to tracking and addressing related issues that may emerge even many years later, from secondary cancers to an increased risk for endocrine disorders or cardiovascular disease.

We focus on survivors of all sorts of pediatric cancers anything from neuroblastoma to hepatoblastoma, said Dr. Casillas, a member of the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. But we also focus on those that cross into the young adult age group, which includes leukemia, lymphoma, brain tumors, germ cell tumors and sarcomas.

Patients need to be at least one year past their cancer treatment to receive survivorship care at the clinic, although some are referred there even many years afterward, said Dr. Casillas, who serves as the clinics director and is also a professor of pediatrics at in the division of hematology and oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

The only other requirement is that their treatment needs to have occurred at some point between childhood and young adulthood. Thats because the issues they face may affect them developmentally and can have ripple effects throughout their lives.

At the clinic, survivors of childhood and adolescent cancers receive personalized treatment plans to address what are termed late effects: a broad category that can include secondary cancers as well as various psychosocial effects such as mental health issues or learning difficulties.

Chemotherapy and radiation can have an effect on the heart and lungs, Dr. Casillas noted, and there are heightened risks for various secondary cancers. Patients diagnosed with cancer during their youth also face increased risks for accelerated aging, such as decreased cardiovascular function or an increase in frailty, much sooner than is typical. Were actually seeing that the aging process is sped up, Dr. Casillas said.

Not only have these late effects become more apparent now that there are far more survivors of childhood cancers, the treatment protocols continue to evolve as well. One example: A new study showed that a blood pressure medication can help protect against heart damage caused by doxorubicin, a widely used chemotherapy drug.

Patients may also have challenges such as learning difficulties as a result of radiation therapy, or may need help navigating school issues such as returning to college or requesting accommodations such as additional time for test-taking.

We know specifically which late effects youre at risk for, because its very targeted based on your individual cancer treatment, said Dr. Casillas. Even if you had the same diagnosis as someone else, you may not have gotten the same treatment. Thats why this clinic is critical, because it provides a specific plan based on your treatment history.

While treatment for cancer can be considered a traumatic life event, she noted, it can be even more so for a young person who may be grappling with body image issues, such as coping with baldness, or worrying about potential future impact on their fertility.

Undergoing cancer treatment can be overwhelming, but once it ends, patients can feel unmoored.

Some people have described going through chemo as kind of like a safety net, Dr. Casillas said, given the all-encompassing nature of frequent treatments such as chemotherapy, blood transfusions and radiation. But afterward, patients may not even know what questions to ask about potential future issues, or may wonder if various symptoms theyre experiencing are related to their cancer treatment.

Survivorship care bridges that gap, Dr. Casillas explained. Even though patients will typically be followed by their oncologist for a period of time and will likely have a primary care provider as well, neither specializes in the wide range of survivorship issues, including the need for additional late effects screenings (or earlier cancer screenings) based on the patients cancer treatment history.

Although patients treated at freestanding childrens hospitals may be receiving survivorship care there, it typically ends once they turn 21 and reach the age cutoff.

At UCLA, though, which provides both pediatric and adult care, theres no such cutoff. Were able to provide care across the age continuum from childhood through adulthood, Dr. Casillas said. We have the ability to provide care without an end date, and thats very unique.

Patients may be referred from other treatment centers or from within UCLA Health, and some patients are even referred from adult oncologists treating survivors of childhood cancers. What matters is the age at which the cancer was diagnosed, not the age of the patient or even the specific prognosis, Dr. Casillas said.

We may have patients who have a brain tumor who are now being followed by the neuro-oncology team, but they have specific survivorship needs. We are not diagnostic specific in the sense that we are doing these survivorship care plans based on an individuals treatment, not necessarily on their diagnosis, she said.

In addition to Dr. Casillas, the clinic includes a nurse practitioner who helps patients navigate referrals, an education specialist who helps with learning and school-related issues, and a robust referral network of various specialists, including cardio oncologists.

We refer within UCLA Health to targeted multidisciplinary providers to help care for our patients when they have specific late effects, Dr. Casillas said.

Although patients dont start receiving care at the clinic until at least one year after their treatment ends, the goal is to educate them about the need for survivorship care much earlier than that, Dr. Casillas said, to empower them to be active consumers in their survivorship care.

Thats currently being done via text-messaging-based outreach to the clinics patients, but she hopes to expand the audience by working with pediatric oncology departments to identify patients and sign them up right when they finish treatment.

We want to bring survivorship care to where the survivor is, Dr. Casillas said. There can be a lot of missed opportunities for needed survivorship care screening as they move into adulthood, she explained. It might have been the parent driving the care, or they moved out of state and are no longer connected to their cancer center.

Patients are prompted via text to select their top three goals, then directed to additional recommended steps and resources. They also receive follow-up calls to help them navigate through issues such as insurance roadblocks or delays in getting a referral to a survivorship doctor.

Not only does the text-messaging outreach distill down what can be an overwhelming amount of information into an accessible format, she noted, it also increases the likelihood that patients will seek out survivorship care, which in turn helps improve their long-term outcomes.

"Right now we are focusing on the young adult patients and have not yet done it with parents," Dr. Casillas said, "but that is phase 2 of the research, to start reaching out to parents and younger teens.

Reaching out to survivors in a way thats effective also means doing so in a way thats culturally relevant, Dr. Casillas noted. We know that having more culturally targeted communications and understanding the unique needs of our diverse populations are critically important.

Because more than half of the clinics patients are Latino, she recently created a fotonovela (a photo-based booklet with text bubbles for dialogue) in both Spanish and English. The booklet was funded via a grant from the National Cancer Institute and developed with input from local community members, including an advisory group of survivors and their families.

We know that within our Latino community, the importance of family is so critical, Dr. Casillas said, so when we wrote the booklet, we took a family-centered approach.

The story is told through the lens of a young teenager whos a cancer survivor and wants to play soccer. It integrates the family, and it also integrates the discussion with the doctor, she explained. Many times, people dont want to challenge their doctor or ask them for things. Were trying to educate them that yes, its OK to ask your doctor for a survivorship care plan.

The fotonovela also addresses health insurance, which can be a big barrier, for teens and young adults, Dr. Casillas said. Health insurance literacy isnt easy for anybody, she pointed out.

Although fotonovelas have previously been used in other health contexts, such as diabetes educational outreach, they hadnt yet been used for reaching cancer survivors. But it was a format that made sense for this audience, she noted.

We knew the key survivorship messages to convey to help change health behaviors. The goal is to help ensure theyll get that needed care, Dr. Casillas explained, versus I dont want to deal with it, because Im too scared.

The booklet is available in print and in an electronic format.

Weve taken these national educational tools that are very dense and wordy and made them understandable for teens and young adults and their family members, Dr. Casillas said. Theyre still getting the same health messages, she noted, but in a more accessible and relevant format.

Above all, Dr. Casillas said, we want it to be a hopeful message."

Because the whole thing with survivorship care and late effects is that if we know that something could be a risk, we can screen for it, she said. And if you do develop it, we can pick it up early enough so that its not a big health risk.

Lisa L. Lewis is the author of this article.

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UCLA Health clinic helps ensure survivors of pediatric and ... - UCLA Health Connect

Pediatrics

Fauci to Pediatricians: You Have a ‘Reservoir of Trust’ With the Public – Medpage Today

WASHINGTON -- Anthony Fauci, MD, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, reminded pediatricians gathered here for their annual meeting that they play a key role in public health.

While there's been concern about an erosion of trust in science, Fauci said, the "reservoir of trust that you as pediatricians have built every day increases our chance to realize the full potential of what we have to offer our children, our young adults, and in fact everyone throughout the world."

Mostly, that's "proven vaccines and medicines that we already have to keep our people healthy, as well as the anticipation of the promise of the development of new medical tools in the future," said Fauci, who spoke during the Monday plenary session at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) annual meeting here.

Fauci was at the meeting to receive an Honorary Fellow designation, which, according to the AAP, "represents the highest distinction and expression of gratitude by the Academy."

Sandy Chung, MD, president of the AAP, presented Fauci with the honorary designation, noting that "pediatricians are no strangers to the vast misinformation and disinformation that became increasingly prevalent during the last few years. And we're so grateful for Dr. Fauci's steadfast leadership, guiding our nation's response in that especially trying time."

Fauci, who is also the former White House chief medical advisor to the Biden administration, said he was "truly humbled and honored" to accept the honorary fellowship.

"When I was first contacted about whether I'd be willing to come here to receive this, my thought was, 'are you kidding -- of course,' for a number of reasons," he continued.

"One, for the great deal of respect that I have for, not only your organization, but for the entire field of pediatrics, but also to take this opportunity -- which I don't get to do often in a venue such as this -- to really sincerely thank you for what you have done throughout your entire careers as pediatricians," Fauci said. "But particularly, you've been the shining light over the last 3 years -- 3 years, 9 months, and 42 days, but who's counting -- of the COVID outbreak."

Following Fauci's remarks, the plenary session featured presentations on issues currently affecting pediatric practice, including the pediatric mental health crisis and the legal landscape of abortion.

Joan Jeung, MD, MPH, of the University of California San Francisco, detailed how relationships can be leveraged to address a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health.

"Children exposed to four or more ACEs [adverse childhood experiences] have roughly double the odds of being diagnosed with asthma, five times the odds of being diagnosed with ADHD, about four times the odds of facing teen pregnancy or depression, and 32 times the odds of having any learning or behavior problem," Jeung said. "But we are in this because we know that adversity is not destiny."

"The scientific literature around what promotes resilience in children shows us that the children who go on to do well have had at least one stable and committed caring parent or other adult caregiver in their lives," she noted. "Relationships are so important that we can think of them as a vital sign. Just as we measure heart rate, blood pressure, height, and weight because they tell us important things about the state of that child's health and trajectory that they're on, we should also look at the state of caregiving relationships around the child."

This involves partnering with patients and their caregivers, and creating a plan together, she explained, as well as having empathy and using listening as an intervention.

In the last presentation, Katie Watson, JD, of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, noted that 12% of abortion patients are 19 years old or younger, while 59% are mothers. "Many moms and kids in your office have needed, or will need, an abortion," she said.

So, what can pediatricians do?

"Well, first of all, maximize flourishing within the laws," Watson said. "And what that means, of course, is doubling down on health education or contraceptive access, and then when ... unwanted pregnancies occur, focus on counseling and referrals."

"And then also, I urge you to work towards changing the law to maximize family flourishing," she added. "We don't agree on abortion, that's okay. But in your role as healthcare providers focusing on the ethics of access."

Jennifer Henderson joined MedPage Today as an enterprise and investigative writer in Jan. 2021. She has covered the healthcare industry in NYC, life sciences and the business of law, among other areas.

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Fauci to Pediatricians: You Have a 'Reservoir of Trust' With the Public - Medpage Today

Pediatrics

Lee Health Reminds the Southwest Florida Community that … – South Florida Hospital News

October 24, 2023 As children and teenagers gear up for fall sports, Lee Health wants to remind the Southwest Florida community that pediatric electrocardiograms (EKG) are an easy and painless test to measure the electrical activity of childrens and teenagers hearts.

An EKG records the electrical signal from the heart to check for different heart conditions, listens to the rhythm of the heartbeat, the size of the chambers of the heart and the amount of blood going to the heart muscle itself.

All children and teenagers benefit from getting an EKG that helps identify any potential problem that warrants a follow-up with a cardiac specialist, said pediatric cardiologist, Dr. Eric Eason. Preventive medicine and peace of mind can help save lives and enable our children and loved ones to live full and happy lives.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2010, one in 250 to one in 59 children and teenagers were living with a congenital heart defect in certain areas of the United States.

A couple of years ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics called for all children to be screened for conditions that can lead to cardiac arrest or death, regardless of their athletic status and particularly as they enter middle school or junior high school.

Ongoing specialty care helps people with heart defects live as normal and fulfilling a life as possible, especially when detects are found and established early.

Golisano Childrens Hospital of Southwest Florida offers free EKG testing to middle and high school-aged athletes. The free EKGs are available without an appointment. More information can be found by visiting https://www.leehealth.org/our-services/pediatric-cardiology/youth-heart-screening.

Marcella McIntyre took advantage of the free EKG when she brought her 17-year-old daughter in for a test.

My daughter had headaches and I brought her in for the free pediatric EKG. She plays soccer and I wanted to rule everything out and make sure she doesnt have anything to be concerned about when it comes to her heart, McIntyre said. It was easy and you dont need to make an appointment. We only waited about 10 minutes and it gave us both peace of mind. I think every child and teenage athlete should do it. Its good to know where you stand.

Lee Health also works with national organizations like Who We Play For to provide free EKG screenings for children and teenagers at various community events throughout the year.

If your child is presenting any of the below symptoms of a heart problem, consult your childs primary care physician or pediatric cardiologist:

For more information, please visit http://www.leehealth.org.

About Lee Health

Since the opening of the first hospital in 1916, Lee Health has been a health care leader in Southwest Florida, constantly evolving to meet the needs of the community. A non-profit, integrated health care services organization, Lee Health is committed to the well-being of every individual served, focused on healthy living and maintaining good health. Staffed by caring people, inspiring health, services are conveniently located throughout the community in four acute care hospitals, two specialty hospitals, outpatient centers, walk-in medical centers, primary care and specialty physician practices and other services across the continuum of care. Learn more at http://www.LeeHealth.org.

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Lee Health Reminds the Southwest Florida Community that ... - South Florida Hospital News

Pediatrics

Phoenix Childrens will train first responders for pediatric 911 calls – Arizona Big Media

In an effort to improve prehospital care of children facing medical emergencies, Phoenix Childrenswill host the EMS and Prehospital Care Conferenceon Oct. 30 at the Wild Horse Pass Resort, located at 5040 Wild Horse Pass Blvd. in Chandler.

Phoenix Childrens physician experts will headline the event, that will bring together nearly 1,000 first responders, doctors, nurses, allied health professionals and other medical providers from across Arizona.

Ranking Arizona: Top 10 hospitals for 2023

Every second counts in an emergency, especially when children are involved said Julie Augenstein, MD, emergency department physician and EMS Base Hospital medical director at Phoenix Childrens. We want to make sure first responders have access to the knowledge and tools they need to provide immediate life-saving care for Arizonas children, who come with different symptoms, ways of communicating and require different treatments than adults.

This is the fifth EMS conference Phoenix Childrens has produced. The health system prioritizes this training to ensure EMS partners can recognize pediatric-specific symptoms and know how to help stabilize Arizonas youngest patients. The goal is to ensure children arrive at the hospital in the best condition possible.

The day-long event will provide training in emergency care for infants and children experiencing trauma, heart issues, heat-related illnesses, sepsis, complications after a home birth and other serious and life-threatening emergencies. Emergency medical technicians, paramedics and nurses can earn up to six accredited pediatric continuing education hours.

The conference will also include an address by Shaughn Maxwell, a nationally acclaimed leader, speaker and writer about human factors, performance, leadership and community paramedicine. Maxwell has more than 30 years experience in fire service and currently oversees EMS and Community Paramedic Operations for more than 300 firefighters who respond to 30,000 calls annually in South Snohomish County in Washington.

Phoenix Childrens is a communications hub for pediatric emergencies, providing guidance to EMTs, paramedics and firefighters in the field regardless of whether the patients final destination is Phoenix Childrens or another hospital.

The Phoenix Childrens Hospital Thomas Campus Emergency Department is an Advanced Life Support (ALS) Base Hospital verified by the Arizona Department of Health Services specifically for pediatrics. Phoenix Childrens is the only childrens hospital inArizonato earn this accreditation.

The health system has pediatric emergency departments at Phoenix Childrens Hospital Thomas Campus and the new Phoenix Childrens Avondale Campus, which opened in July 2023. Phoenix Childrens will further expand its number of pediatric emergency departments in 2024 with the openings of Phoenix Childrens Hospital Arrowhead Campus and Phoenix Childrens Hospital East Valley Campus.

The EMS and Prehospital Care Conference will also feature an exhibitor hall with vendors who provide services to first responders. This years exhibitors include Maricopa Ambulance, Banner Air, Native Air, Guardian Air, Gila River EMS, Gila River Health Care, Grand Canyon University, Blueline AZ Homes brokered by My Home Group, Ruiz Team at Prime Lending, Academy of Emergency Arts and many others.

First responders are encouraged to register in advance for the conference at https://ems.phoenixchildrens.org/.

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Phoenix Childrens will train first responders for pediatric 911 calls - Arizona Big Media

Human Behavior

The positive health effects of prosocial behaviors | News | Harvard … – HSPH News

October 25, 2023 In an opinion piece in Nature Human Behavior, Laura Kubzansky, professor of social and behavioral sciences and co-director of the JPB Environmental Health Fellowship Program at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and her co-authors argued that prosociality is a critical, but underappreciated, factor affecting population healthand urged public health researchers and practitioners to invest more resources to better understand it.

Q: What is prosociality and how does it impact human health?

A: When we talk about prosociality we talk about the beliefs and behaviors of people who care about others and want to benefit others with their actions. Altruism, cooperation, compassion, empathy, and social capitalall of these are examples of prosocial behaviors and conditions.

Research has found that prosociality has positive health benefits. For example, scientists have looked at the relationship between volunteering, which is helping others with no apparent reward (or expectation of one), and mortality. They reliably find that people who volunteer more also tend to live longer lives. Other studies also found that during the COVID-19 pandemic people living in communities with higher levels of prosociality were also more willing to wear a mask or receive the vaccine, which are behaviors that we now know are associated with lower COVID-19 mortality rates. In fact, a recent Lancet Commission identified low levels of prosociality as a contributing factor to the numerous failures we saw during the pandemic around the world with regard to controlling deaths from this infectious disease. My co-authorsRichard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Elissa Epel at the University of California San Franciscoand I believe that the effects of prosociality go beyond mitigating effects of infectious diseases and that prosociality can improve both individual and community health much more broadly.

Q: You call for prosociality to become a novel strategy for improving population health. What do you mean by that?

A: We need to invest time and resources to better understand prosociality and its effect on population health. In public health, we try to identify factors that can improve the health and well-being of people. For example, we look at an unhealthy diet and ask ourselves, Who is more likely to consume it and why? How can we improve it and what are the health consequences if we do so?

We need to do the same with prosocialitytry to better measure how much prosociality matters for population health. And if we find out that it does in fact matter, we should study the mechanisms through which prosociality improves health. We should look at ways to increase prosociality among the population. We should also monitor the downstream effects and look at the distribution of prosocial behaviors in the population. Are they more prevalent among certain groups of people? What conditions do we need to make it more prevalent? And do diverse populations benefit from prosociality equally or are certain people more likely to see health benefits when they engage in prosocial behaviors? Those are all questions we would like to be able to answer by conducting national surveys, adding measures of prosociality to major cohort studies, and running randomized trials.

Q: How could prosociality help improve public health?

A: When we talk about improving health, we often focus on clinicians caring for individuals who are already struggling with problems. The call for making prosociality a public health priority is an effort to focus on upstream factors that enable people to maintain better health for longer, and thereby reduce the need for clinicians over the long run. Risk factors are very important, but sometimes they are not enough. We need to also identify the health assets that can protect our physical and mental health.

In the U.S. we are facing an epidemic of deaths of despair and a mental health crisis. It is crucial that we try to minimize or eliminate risk factors such as poverty, family medical history, or smoking, which we know put certain individuals more at risk for deaths of despair and mental health struggles. At the same time, however, we must recognize we can do better and aspire to do more than solely reducing misery. We must also identify and promote factors that can help people attain and maintain health and prevent them from developing illness in the first place.

Improving population levels of prosocialitycould also be particularly relevant in the context of climate change and other major societal disruptions like civil unrest or war. Increasing levels ofprosocialityor our willingness to engage in actions that help others, either at the individual or the societal level, could be a game changer to reduce the impacts of large-scale societal events on our health.

During COVID-19, we saw a deficit of kindness and compassion. And we also saw the public health consequences of that. I would argue that understanding prosociality isnt simply a nice-to-have luxury. It is a critical and underappreciated factor that deserves our full attention.

Giulia Cambieri

Illustration: iStock / Mykyta Dolmatov

*This story was updated to include the names of the co-authors.

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The positive health effects of prosocial behaviors | News | Harvard ... - HSPH News

Human Behavior

The valuable link between succession planning and skills – Human Resource Executive

When labor researchers look back on this chapter in time, they will likely deem it the era of skills. Nearly every organization wants to become skills-based or skills-centric as they finally recognize the significant value that skills visibility presents across the organization. Even so, this journey remains nascent because, while employers know what they want, they dont necessarily know how to get it. And nowhere is this more apparent than in succession planning.

Historically, succession planning has proved challenging, with only some rolesprimarily in the C-suitedeemed worthy of the effort. As such, succession planning has rarely been an enterprise-wide initiative. This kind of mindset is counterproductive, especially if the goal is the organizations long-term viability.

Identifying a gap between reality and intent, Deloitte conducted a years-long research study that found, Most companies doing succession planning are often derailed by a host of symptoms that point back to a common culprit: the failure to recognize and address the impact of human behavior on the succession-planning process. This distinction is important because, as the American Psychological Association explains, Human skills are based in behavior.

Considering the link between skills and behavior, skills visibility is fundamental to building a successful succession-planning strategy. Leveraging skills and continuously reevaluating those skills to inform and update talent pools and talent pipelines is critical to long-term success.

Here are five ways to do that:

Succession planning is a what goes around, comes around talent strategy for a few reasons. For one, it enables organizations to retain employees, ensuring the ability to navigate evolving labor market conditions.

For another, researchers like Josh Bersin have known what successful succession planning entails for years that: We are greater than me. These types of strategies require empowering employees, operating collectively and measuring the results. Whats different today is how and where organizations apply succession planning to their business.

Recommendation: Rather than dust off the same succession-planning strategy used in years prior, consider how the organizations current state will inform its future state.

Rather than focus only on specific roles, focus on a desired outcome. Though outcomes vary by organization, HRD points out that succession planning is a practical way to minimize disruption through proactive risk management, enabling organizations to adapt to changing circumstances and fill critical roles with little to no negative impact on productivity and performance. Taking an expanded definition can provide benefits across the organization and enable employees at all levels to showcase skills that might otherwise be overlooked.

Recommendation: Knowing there are multiple ways to use succession planning, start by designing a strategy that connects a specific need to a measurable result.

Having the right people in the right place at the right time is critical, so with a why in place, take the time to assess and evaluate the skills, competencies and organizational knowledge that currently exist across the business.

This level of insight will help determine succession candidates as well as any at-risk roles, teams or business units. As Deloitte suggested, failing to see whats already there is often the root cause of why these initiatives fail, making it even more important to prioritize skills visibility from the start.

Recommendation: Skills are the currency of the modern workplace and should be factored into any succession-planning strategy. By understanding what exists, its possible to envision where to go and how to bridge skill gaps.

See also: How to capitalize on skills tech offerings in a market now worth $1.3B

Remember that every employee brings a unique set of skills and knowledge to both their role and the organization. LinkedIn Research shows that employees are twice as likely to stay if they have the chance to take on other opportunities within the business. This is why succession planning cannot operate in a vacuum; it must be knitted into a larger talent framework. Keeping employees engaged and satisfied at work is as much a part of succession planning as it is internal mobility, learning and development and other strategies.

Recommendation: As business objectives are apt to change over time, so are employees wants, needs and desires. Be sure to keep the employee experience top of mind throughout the process.

To follow through on the addressing human behavior piece of Deloittes findings, organizations need to centralize and institutionalize succession planning. There are a few ways to go about this, from capturing knowledge before people have the chance to leave the organization to creating personalized development plans to advance skills development. Its one thing to have visibility. Its another to use this to the organizations advantage.

The right technology will automatically map out career paths, match employees with opportunities that facilitate growth and support talent deployment to fill vacancies and maintain active talent pipelines.

Recommendation: Dont lose sight of the plan once enacted. Lean on technology to support these changes as goals and circumstances continue to evolve.

SHRM notes that Succession planning is used to anticipate the future needs of the organization and to assist in finding, assessing and developing the human capital necessary to realize the strategy of the organization. There is nothing short-term about succession planning, nor should there be.

And while the saying goes, The best-laid plans in this instance, that means revisiting and retooling along the way, changing course as the need for different skills and behaviors ebbs and flows, and sticking with succession planning until it becomes deeply entrenched as an integral part of the organizational makeup.

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The valuable link between succession planning and skills - Human Resource Executive

Human Behavior

How humans use their sense of smell to find their way | Penn Today – Penn Today

It was a sweet tooth that turned sixth-year psychology Ph.D. student Clara Raithel onto the human sense of smell.

As a masters student, I was studying how the brain responds to the sweet taste under various conditions, for example, whether we approach certain food with an indulgent or restrictive mindset, she says. I realized you cant really study eating behaviors without understanding how peoples brains respond to odors. I decided to look for grad school experiences where I could study the human sense of smell.

In the laboratory of Jay Gottfried, Arthur H. Rubenstein University Professor in Psychology and Neuroscience, Raithel found the perfect mentor. Gottfried has studied olfactionessentially, the science of smellfor nearly two decades. Since I was a little kid, Ive loved the sense of smell, Gottfried says. Humans have five senses, and they work in tandem, in an integrated way.

But for almost no reason at all, people tend to pick smell as the sense theyd be fine without if they had to lose one, he says. Gottfried felt smell had been highly misjudged, and as a neuroscientist, wanted to prove it by taking a deep dive into questions of odor coding and navigation.

By the time Raithel joined his lab in 2018, Gottfried and colleagues had already experimented with the ways in which humans navigate abstract smells such as banana or rose in two-dimensional spaces, finding that certain parts of the brain linked with memory and emotions help people understand which aromas surround them. Now he wanted to take the work in a more natural direction, creating a three-dimensional virtual reality smellscape (think landscape, but for the nose) that people could attempt to move through.

For the new experiment, 28 participants each entered the smellscape four times. The placement of eight odor objects in the environmentsmells like orange or bananaalways stayed the same. What changed was where participants were placed in the virtual reality arena and which target odor they needed to find.

The results surprised and excited the researchers. Although the human sense of smell has been poorly regarded across the five different senses, we are now able to establish that human subjects can actually navigate spaces using their nose in the context of a particular type of virtual reality environment, Gottfried says.

We also demonstrated that this behavior was associated with the emergence of a particular neural signature indicative of what we might call cognitive maps, Raithel adds. This neural signature not only appeared in areas traditionally associated with navigation behavior, but also in olfactory-related brain regions. Their findings suggest that these two sets of brain regions share a common spatial code, something that hadnt previously been known.

Read more at OMNIA.

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How humans use their sense of smell to find their way | Penn Today - Penn Today

Human Behavior

Wrestling With Evil in the World, or Is It Something Else? – Psychiatric Times

PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

Over 13 years ago, on March 2010, I wrote an article for Psychiatric Times titled Wrestling with Evil in Prison Psychiatry. My writings on prison psychiatry actually won health care journalism recognition.

Having never before applied the word evil in psychiatry, I ended up doing so in regards to one patient. Nothing else seemed to apply, neither gang involvement, antisocial personality disorder, or his religious beliefs. At that time, for clinical applicability, I came up with this definition of evil:

Evil is unacceptable, destructive behavior, exhibited without remorse and without a more general moral framework, which cannot be explained solely by psychopathology.

The word is most often used in relationship to religious beliefs, and especially in situations that seem horrific. Since that prison encounter, I have come to conclude that any evil-seeming behavior is likely intertwined with whatever psychopathology may be present.

I feel a sense of deja vu as the Mideast and Ukrainian-Russian wars go on. Evil has been tossed back and forth as an explanation of the atrocities that have taken place in the invasions, but without explaining its genesis. Here, gang behavior seems as prominent as any other evil explanation.

Then there is the recent mass shooting in Maine, the only news to get the Mideast war off the front page of the mainstream news. Here, though, there seems to be a clearer psychiatric explanation, with the perpetrator having a history of auditory hallucinations. He spent 2 weeks in an inpatient facility this summer after apparently threatening a military facility, but more information will be required to understand the role of mental illness and its treatment in his crime.

Ultimately, almost by definition, human nature and human behavior seem to be at the genesis of any such violent horror. Freud wrote much about it, especially in his book Civilization and Its Discontents, even suggesting a death wish. Regardless of the need for better gun safety, it behooves us in psychiatry to try to increase our knowledge and interventions to reduce evil.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry, and is now in retirement and refirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled Psychiatric Views on the Daily News and a weekly video, Psychiatry & Society, since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.

Read more here:
Wrestling With Evil in the World, or Is It Something Else? - Psychiatric Times

Human Behavior

Shimmying like electric fish is a universal movement across species – Earth.com

Navigating the world around us might seem like a complex task, but it turns out, we all have something in common with an electric knifefish. Whether its a dog sniffing around or a human glancing in a new setting, the core behavior of trying to understand ones surroundings remains the same.

Recent research reveals that such movements arent unique to humans or even larger animals. It extends across a wide spectrum of organisms, from single-celled amoeba to complex beings like us.

Amoeba dont even have a nervous system, and yet they adopt behavior that has a lot in common with a humans postural balance or fish hiding in a tube, said study co-author Noah Cowan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins.

These organisms are quite far apart from each other in the tree of life, suggesting that evolution converged on the same solution through very different underlying mechanisms.

This fascinating discovery originated from a study that was focused on the workings of the nervous system during movement to enhance perception. Observations of the electric knifefish, a creature emitting weak electric discharges to sense its location, were key.

In darkness, the fish shimmied back and forth more frequently than in the light. The darkness made the fish increase their movement, mimicking a rapid explore mode to understand their environment better.

The concept of switching between an explore mode during uncertainty and an exploit mode when familiar with the environment isnt restricted to these fish.

We found that the best strategy is to briefly switch into explore mode when uncertainty is too high, and then switch back to exploit mode when uncertainty is back down, said study first author Debojyoti Biswas, a Johns Hopkins postdoctoral researcher.

Supported by a model simulating these key sensing behaviors, the team identified similar patterns in amoeba, moths, cockroaches, moles, bats, mice, and even humans.

Not a single study that we found in the literature violated the rules we discovered in the electric fish, not even single-celled organisms like amoeba sensing an electric field, said Cowan.

To further illustrate the ubiquitous nature of these movements, Cowan related it to everyday human behavior.

If you go to a grocery store, youll notice people standing in line will change between being stationary and moving around while waiting, said Cowan.

We think thats the same thing going on, that to maintain a stable balance you actually have to occasionally move around and excite your sensors like the knifefish. We found the statistical characteristics of those movements are ubiquitous across a wide range of animals, including humans.

Beyond just understanding the natural world, the implications of this research are vast. The findings have the potential to revolutionize robotics, especially in applications like search and rescue drones and space rovers.

Next, the experts will test whether their insights hold true for other living things, including plants.

Electric knifefish are a diverse group with over 200 species that are found primarily in Central and South America. These fish are known for their ability to generate electric fields, which they use for navigation, communication, and sometimes for capturing prey.

Electric knifefish have an organ that produces weak electric discharges. This is distinct from the strong electric discharges produced by electric eels, a different group of fish.

They use their electric field to sense their surroundings. Objects around them distort this field, and the fish can detect these distortions to understand their environment, much like a sonar.

Different species, and even individual fish, may have unique electric organ discharge patterns. This allows them to communicate and recognize each other.

They are primarily found in freshwater environments, especially in slow-moving or stagnant waters like swamps, ponds, and riverbanks.

Electric knifefish are typically nocturnal, using their electric fields to navigate in the darkness.

The study is published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

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Shimmying like electric fish is a universal movement across species - Earth.com