Our KNX Hero of the Week, Jennifer Hayakawa, is a critical care nurse who has made it her mission to make sure her colleagues don't suffer from burnout.
Hayakawa, who serves as the Director of Nursing Research and Innovation at Rady Children's Hospital OC, is creating a safe space for nurses, doctors, techs and hospital staff to reflect, get support, and share their personal own stories of triumph and hardship.
In 2022, Hayakawa discovered a storytelling program called Dear World and immediately that it was something she wanted to incorporate at her place of work.
“We partnered with Dear World to create a unique program called Dear Hospital that's specific for a healthcare environment,” she told Heroes host Heather Jordan. “Dear Hospital is a structured storytelling experience where healthcare workers take a moment to reflect on a meaningful moment in their journey, and they write what we call a dear hospital letter about what the experience has taught them, how it's challenged them, or what it's awakened in them.”
She said that with the program, there's a brain tattoo that every storyteller gets to pick.
“Each participant chooses a short phrase or captures the heart of their story in what we call a brain tattoo that they then write on their skin and then they sit for a professional photograph, so it becomes like an incredibly powerful symbol of identity and purpose,” she said.
The portraits get uploaded onto a special sharing page online, and there's a quarterly immersive pop-up that features the photos and stories for staff and families.
Hayakawa said it's super important for the nurses, doctors and staff who work in these critical thinking positions get the support and acknowledgement that they deserve.
“Oftentimes, you have to stuff that aside to continue to provide the care that you do, but it can catch up with you and I think we definitely saw that during the pandemic,” she said. “ So we thought about how do we create a space for people doing this hard work, caring for children and families to reconnect to each other and to the meaning in what they do.”
Hayakawa has her own brain tattoo - Chumbawamba.
“When I was a sophomore in college, and I'd been kicked out of college due to poor academic performance and as you can imagine, I was crushed,” she said. “It was actually the first time I'd ever failed at anythingso I was embarrassed, and I made myself a promise, that it wasn't, it wasn't going to let that define me. It wasn't going to be the end of my story. So I'm totally dating myself here, but that same year, the group Chumbawamba had a huge hit that was on every radio station, and the chorus was, ‘I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never gonna keep me down.’ And that became my theme song. I did get back up. I enrolled in community college and I worked harder to prove myself. The following year, I got readmitted back to my university. I had changed my major, and I hustled and I'm proud to say that I actually graduated within 4 years alongside my original classmates because of that. So that experience really humbled me, and it taught me something that I've carried kind of ever since, is that when you take accountability and you refuse to quit, you can rewrite your own story.”
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