If you or someone you know is a community health worker, please join us for our upcoming webinar Witnessing: Understanding the Effects of Overexposure to Stories of Hardship and Trauma and What to Do About It.

In this 90-minute webinar, Dr. Weingarten will discuss how clinicians are overexposed to hardship and trauma. The resulting distress may come from the stories they hear from patients or situations they observe directly. Providers may also experience distress when interacting with those who set and administer the policies (e.g., insurers, legislatures) that affect the people they serve. The pandemic has amplified the conditions that challenge both patients and providers.  Providers may also have complex histories.  Current situations may activate providers’ memories of difficult personal experiences, making it harder to cope with contemporary stress. This seminar provides a framework for conceptualizing causes of provider distress, discusses strategies for building provider resilience, and identifies “reasonable hope” as a source of inspiration in the current context of clinical care.

Duration: 1.5 hours

Kaethe Weingarten, Ph.D., directs the Witness to Witness (W2W) Program for the Migrants Clinician Network. The goal of W2W is to help the helpers, primarily serving health care workers, attorneys, and journalists working with vulnerable populations. She worked at Harvard Medical School (1981-2017), where she was an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology, and at the Family Institute of Cambridge (1982-2009). She founded and directed the Program in Families, Trauma, and Resilience at the Family Institute of Cambridge.  Internationally, she has taught in Africa, Australia, Canada, Europe, and New Zealand, where she was a Fulbright Specialist. Dr. Weingarten’s work focuses on developing and disseminating a witnessing model.  She has written or edited six books and over 100 articles, chapters, and essays. Her work on reasonable hope has been widely cited.