Reclaiming Healthcare’s Humanity

Stories, movements, and voices challenging the status quo—because people must come before profit.

April 2025

Dear Medicine Forward Community,

Spotlight: The Patient Revolution – Careful and Kind Care for All

At Medicine Forward, we’re inspired by those who are working to put human connection and dignity at the center of healthcare. That’s why, this month, we’re highlighting the work of The Patient Revolution—a nonprofit movement advancing the cause of careful and kind care for all.

Through initiatives like the Foundations of Care course, they bring together patients, caregivers, clinicians, and changemakers to learn, reflect, and lead their own “mini-revolutions” within the healthcare system. The course is rooted in storytelling, empathy, and collaboration—values we deeply share at Medicine Forward.

The Patient Revolution reminds us that it is possible to do better. With community, courage, and compassion, we can create care systems that are healing for everyone involved.

🔗 Explore The Patient Revolution
🖱 Learn about the Foundations of Care course

Exposing the Crisis: Support the Making of Suck It Up, Buttercup

Over 400 physicians die by suicide every year. Behind that number are stories of burnout, moral injury, and a system that too often values profits over people.

We are proud to support Suck It Up, Buttercup—a bold, investigative documentary currently in production that exposes the dangerous dysfunction of American healthcare. Through raw storytelling and deep inquiry, the film shines a light on corporate greed, systemic bureaucratic failures, and the deteriorating conditions that threaten both those who provide care and those who seek it.

This is not just a film about problems—it’s about solutions. It critically examines broken systems and highlights care models that are working, asking the urgent question: What will it take to build something better?

This project is deeply personal to Medicine Forward. Two of our leaders, Dr. Todd Otten and Dr. MaryAnn Wilbur, are serving as Executive Producers. Their lived experience, advocacy, and moral courage are helping ensure this film tells the truth with both clarity and compassion.

This crisis affects all of us—clinicians, healthcare workers, patients, and families alike. And it will take all of us to change it.

🎬 This is your chance to help bring the truth to light.

Your donation will support production and distribution, helping ensure this vital story reaches the people who need to hear it.

🔗 Donate or learn more

TED = Tools for Enzymatic Doctors

How to Be an Effective Catalyst

Failure-Your Secret Sauce ?

Amy Edmondson, PhD, is probably the leading expert on psychological safety. In her recent book “Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well” she defines failure as “an outcome that deviates from a desired result.” She then describes three types of failure: basic, complex, and intelligent. Basic failure occurs in known territory, typically has a single cause, and may be due to inattention, neglect, faulty assumptions, etc. Complex failure is on the rise and is multi-causal, related to interactive complexity. The “swiss-cheese” model described by James Reason shows how complex failures happen. Both of these types of failure warrant preventative efforts; examples include training and failure-proofing for basic, using alarms and engaging people re: concerns for complex.

What Dr. Edmondson calls intelligent failure represents “the right kind of wrong.” The attributes of intelligent failure include: taking place in new, uncharted territory (uncertainty); having a credible opportunity to advance toward a desired goal; informed by available knowledge (hypothesis-driven); the failure being no larger than needed to gain the new knowledge; and the failure’s lessons are identified, shared and used. Change agents are used to doing pilots to begin the testing process. Dr. Edmondson suggests that good pilots bring intelligent failures. When a pilot “works,” you lose the opportunity to learn how to make your initiative better and you may prematurely look to roll out something that’s not ready for prime time. She says, “In new territory, the only way to make progress is through trial and failure.”

How does this relate to her work on psychological safety? Dr. Edmondson defines psychological safety as a belief that the context is safe for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, mistakes & failures. The more uncertainty you’re dealing with, the greater the necessity to experiment, and to expect and celebrate intelligent failures. Effective catalysts create a healthy failure culture by fostering a learning mindset, building skills for experimenting, sharing the lessons learned from failure as widely as possible, and rewarding those speaking up about mistakes, problems, and failures.

Building skills for experimentation requires asking/answering these questions: regarding new territory, what aspect is new/unknown? Regarding being opportunity driven, what positive outcome would make the risk of failure worth it? Regarding prior knowledge, what do we already know that we can use to inform our hypothesis? Regarding small bets, what small experiment will help us learn quickly while making failure survivable? And finally, how will you analyse the results? What will you be looking for? Who will you involve to understand what happened?

As a final recommendation, Dr. Edmondson suggests these be combined as a recipe for excellence in an uncertain world: aim high, team up, fail well, learn fast, and repeat. What’s an intelligent failure that you can share learnings from and celebrate with your team?

Support What Matters Most

At Medicine Forward, we believe in the power of human connection to transform healthcare. Our work—from uplifting Catalyst Stories to supporting changemakers and amplifying groundbreaking projects like Suck It Up, Buttercup—is made possible by people like you.

A $5 membership helps sustain this work and grows a network of advocates, clinicians, patients, and changemakers who refuse to accept the status quo.

Want to go further? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to our Substack. Your support helps us continue to publish powerful stories, convene our community, and catalyze action.

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Help us keep human relationships at the heart of healthcare.