AI Governance in Healthcare: Just Culture & Trauma-Informed Leadership | Susie Branagan

AI governance in healthcare has to start with emotional readiness, not a compliance template — Susie Branagan on human-centered AI governance and just culture.

AI governance in healthcare cannot start with a compliance template. It has to start with emotional readiness, which Susie Branagan, a trauma-informed nurse executive and AI ethics advocate, argues is what most organizations are missing. Her core claim is that organizations cannot be technologically ready if they are not emotionally ready first, and leaders who skip that step will watch their AI initiatives fail regardless of how sophisticated the technology is.

What We Cover

• Why AI readiness is a human problem before it is a technology problem, and what trauma-informed leadership looks like in units facing secondary trauma every day.
• The just culture algorithm and why environments where staff can report mistakes without fear are the foundation every AI deployment needs.
• Data from nurse leader presentations showing roughly 70% have heard of just culture but only 55 to 60% actually practice it, and what that gap costs AI adoption.
• Why emotional intelligence belongs alongside data literacy as a core leadership competency for 2026 and beyond.
• The danger of designing AI with too much artificial empathy, and what Compathia is building to help nursing students practice crisis mental health interactions before the bedside.

Key Takeaways

Governance that begins with compliance rather than human impact will always be reactive. Transparency requires ongoing communication with patients, clinicians, and administrators, not a published policy document.

Just culture is infrastructure for AI adoption. Staff who operate in blame cultures will not report the model failures they see, which means leadership flies blind on the one signal that matters most.

Emotional intelligence is a governance competency. Leaders who cannot read the emotional state of their staff cannot tell the difference between resistance that is legitimate and resistance that is fear. Both require a different response.

Frameworks & Tools Mentioned

• Just Culture Algorithm
• Trauma-informed leadership frameworks
• Compathia (AI-supported simulation for nursing crisis training)
• Second-victim and moral injury literature

Timestamps

00:00 Building Trust in Healthcare Leadership 02:57 Emotional Readiness Before Technological Change 06:03 The Role of Just Culture in Healthcare 08:49 Navigating AI in Healthcare 11:56 Emotional Intelligence and Leadership 18:53 The Importance of Empathy in Nursing 22:35 The Role of AI in Patient Care 29:13 Preparing Healthcare Workers for Crisis Situations 34:20 Leadership in the Age of AI 41:55 Supporting Healthcare Workers' Mental Health

About Susie Branagan

Susie Branagan is a trauma-informed nurse executive and AI ethics advocate with more than 2 decades of frontline nursing experience, including child psychiatry and pediatric ICU. She helps healthcare leaders rebuild trust, shift cultures from blame to learning, and create psychological safety before introducing new technology.

Related Resources

Related episodes:

• Strengthen your AI Projects in 2026. Privacy and AI Governance Insights
• AI Ethics and Ethical Leadership
• Authentic Intelligence: Context, Explainability, Bias, and Human-in-the-Loop

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Transcript

Susie Brannigan: 0:00

We've talked about how healthcare needs to be emotionally ready before it can be technologically ready. What does that look like at the leadership level to you? You want to make sure that everyone you hire is emotionally intelligent and ready enough to be in that environment to create a trauma-informed just culture environment first. You're now having the psychological safety that staff are looking for. That's what staff are looking for when they come to work every day at this point. I was really able to mask and hide how much all of this secondary trauma was affecting me by walking right into the room with a smile on my face and not letting it affect the patient. Because we're like, wow, we have about 20 years of this, 25 years of this weighing on us, weighing on our hearts, weighing on our mind. And this is the first time we're really realizing, like, oh my God, I just 23 years with trauma three to four, five times a day happening.

Christopher Hutchins: 1:06

Susie Brannigan has spent her career helping healthcare organizations rebuild trust from the inside out, shifting cultures from blame to learning, from burnout to belonging. A trauma-informed nurse executive and AI ethics advocate, she's helped leaders reimagine what readiness really means in the digital age, not just new systems, but new kinds of empathy. Susie, welcome to the Signal Room and thank you for taking the time to be here with me today.

Susie Brannigan: 1:33

Well, thank you for having me, and thank you for such a wonderful introduction.

Christopher Hutchins: 1:37

Well, it's a pleasure to have you. I've been looking forward to this because we've had some really great conversations and we're talking about readiness, and there's a lot of conversations happening around how are we going to be able to trust AI and all of that. But I think we've gotten a little bit too much ahead of ourselves, and we really haven't addressed some of the really basic things, and it's really the human readiness gap, I think, that you've mentioned to me before. So you've talked about how healthcare needs to be emotionally ready before it can be technologically ready. What does that look like at the leadership level to you?

Susie Brannigan: 2:10

Sure. You know, basically over the last, I don't know, 20 something years, especially as of late after COVID, you know, staff are growing less and less trustful of their leadership, right? They're always promised these revolutionary solutions, such as even new EHR systems, right? So, oh, we're gonna give you this new EHR, it's gonna be wonderful. We're gonna go from Meditech to Epic. Well, guess what? Like you need to have a team that is emotionally ready and feels safe on their unit first before you introduce these new things, because you may think they're great for the staff as a leader or senior leader, but until you're actually working on the unit, using the system and having a healthy atmosphere around that, you're not going to be successful. So I know from personal experience, even something as simple as going from Meditech to Epic when we did that on one of my units. Thankfully, I had a pretty healthy staff that felt pretty trustworthy of me. That took years of management skills and building trust and all that and using just culture, which I know we're gonna talk about. But they still were skeptical. Like, you know, I don't really like Meditech. It feels like the Oregon Trail, it's just green and white. Nothing's colorful, it's hard to read. So there's no ability to, you know, it's not up with the times, right? But then here comes Epic, and the way it's rolled out is very important. Anything that's rolled out is super important. Before you do that, you have to make sure that everybody's ready first. You're asking their opinion on what they think may go wrong, what do they think are gonna be the biggest challenges, and then try to conquer those things before you implement. Don't just come onto a unit one day with all the Epic gurus and say, today we're moving over to Epic, okay? Get your WOWs out and here it is. It's beautiful, isn't it? It's so colorful, right? But Epic can be very hard to navigate. I remember the experience of some staff, like some were super computer savvy and learn quickly, and others were not computer savvy and had relied on simple notes before, and this was too much for them. So at the end of the day, I'll always come back to the fact that if you don't have a healthy, trustworthy staff first, you can't really implement really anything. We just we've been through so much moral injury over the last few decades. You know, it's understandable that staff are like, you know, I don't really want to do something new right now. I'm fine with what I'm doing. I mean, we're understaffed to begin with. Let me just run my day, right? But if it's done the right way and other things are implemented first, you know, we can be successful. When people feel unsafe, it's like an actual fact that the frontal cortex completely goes offline, like you're completely just not there. And to implement all this stuff and have that feeling in the background for every staff member, a hundred staff people, that's gonna be hard to conquer. So yeah, you have to have that trust back.

Christopher Hutchins: 5:30

No, I remember going through an implementation myself a number of years ago. And yeah, there's a lot of moving parts. And I think the hardest thing was, just as you said, is overcoming some of the obstacles that are really related to the trust factor and for people to be comfortable. You mentioned the different skill levels. I mean, these are all things that were really challenging to navigate but real things.

Susie Brannigan: 5:55

I mean, I felt terrible. Some of my staff that had used Meditech their entire career. When moving to Epic, they crumbled. Went from having no overtime, not really having the normal stresses of working in a healthcare environment, but like two to three hours of overtime every day to get their work done on the computer because they just didn't understand, despite the training classes and the online classes and the people that walk around with the cookies and pizza and help you at the computer for a few minutes, that wasn't enough. If they don't have the computer skill background or their whole career has been using one system, you just have to have other things in place to support. So it does take a leader that walks the unit constantly during implementations. Like you live and breathe there all three shifts.

Christopher Hutchins: 6:48

Yeah, and you've touched on something that I think is really important too. When you're talking about the trust issue, there's been an erosion of it for probably more than a decade, possibly two. I had a conversation recently with a gentleman named Larry Kuhn. He's a clinical psychologist. Some of the stats that he shared with me were staggering, but it reinforces what intuitively I think we know. Really basic things like do you trust the government? Twenty years ago, probably eight out of ten people would have said yes. Trusting law enforcement, clergy, your physician, your co-workers, the CEO. Across the board, those numbers have dropped like a rock. We're talking about in the twenties, in most every one of those categories. So the culture has to be something that gets addressed in the process of this too, because it's a really big shift that we're asking people to go along with us. And if they don't trust guidance that we're giving them and how useful it is, they don't feel psychologically safe, who's gonna raise their hand to point out something that actually could be automated because they're not gonna trust that you're gonna let them keep their job.

Susie Brannigan: 7:59

Yeah, and I think the big difference too with like an Epic and then AI, right? So when we implemented Epic back probably 10 or whatever years ago, that seemed intense to everyone, right? Now you have AI coming, which also seems extremely intense. But also as someone that has used AI on my child psychiatry unit, a challenge that the staff have is meeting halfway, right? So the AI is only there to help you with certain steps and to make your job easier. That's what it should be doing, not harder. But you as a human being always have to check the work, right? You cannot just rely on AI. So AI is there to help you and it can be extremely helpful. It helped prevent so many falls, elopements, suicide attempts, self-harm episodes. But at the end of the day, looking at the numbers and the reports on the AI system that we used, each coworker was different in how they utilized it. Some relied on it completely, and then others were like, okay, I trust that it's working, but I'm gonna go check the patient anyways because something seems off. So with AI, we have to make sure that staff not only are ready for it and feel supported, but also don't use it as a crutch and use it as a care replacement, basically.

Christopher Hutchins: 9:31

You've used the term just culture. I'd love for you to unwrap that a little bit for me. How can organizations use just culture principles to bridge the readiness gap that we've been talking about?

Susie Brannigan: 9:44

Sure. So just culture is like my favorite thing in the world. As you know, I talk about it ad nauseum because I feel like you cannot have success in any organization, not even just healthcare. I'm currently working with a steel industry organization with just culture. Everyone that has an employee or two should start the basis of their unit with this. So, in a perfect world, if you were to open a brand new unit and hire from scratch and have 75 new employees, the first thing that I would do is train all the staff in just culture, what it is, and make sure that the manager that's running that unit runs a just culture environment. For those that don't know, I think at this point in healthcare, a lot of people have either heard of it or are definitely using it. Some of the presentations that I've done at schools for nurse leaders, it was about 70% had heard about it and about 55 to 60% were actually utilizing it. And we need to bring that number up because stats don't lie, turnover rates decrease. Staff are just way happier coming to work when you have an environment where you know you can speak up about concerns, you know that you can go tell your boss that you made a mistake, you know that everyone is in a healthy environment, that toxicity is not tolerated, from everything from being late to work to making a med error. If you can get just culture down pat on your unit first, also making sure that depending on the unit you're on, but it really doesn't matter because any unit can experience trauma. But as an extreme example, if you're running a child psychiatry unit or a children's ICU, a highly acute ICU, that's gonna involve a lot of secondary trauma for the staff, right? They're gonna be seeing a lot of sad stuff. You wanna make sure that everyone you hire is emotionally intelligent and ready enough to be in that environment, and that they're trained in a trauma-informed culture and how to treat the patient that's going through trauma, but also the manager needs to be trauma-informed to make sure that they can support staff that go through that stuff. So if you can create a trauma-informed just culture environment first, you're now having the psychological safety that staff are looking for. That's what staff are looking for when they come to work every day at this point. I unfortunately, along with a lot of people my age in nursing, didn't really feel like we had that support. And it wasn't anyone's fault necessarily. It was more the education around it. Just culture and trauma-informed care was not spoken about at all. When I worked at children's hospital when I was younger, starting out my career, wonderful experience, great staff, great manager, everything. But it just wasn't a thing that we talked about yet. It wasn't a thing that anyone trained in. If you don't have those two things first, and then you're trying to implement something new, you're not gonna be successful. Any new implementation, if they feel like they can come to you and be like, I get that you wanted to do this, I get that this system is what we're gonna go with. Senior leadership hates the word pilot. They don't ever want us to say pilot on a unit because it's definitely not a pilot. From my experience, nothing's been a pilot and it's always going to be permanent no matter what. And that's always been kind of a problem, right? As a manager, you're like the hamburger in between the two buns, right? And you have to tell staff, this new AI system's coming to us. And you can't say the word pilot, but you do want to kind of tell them like this is not going away. So you feel like you're lying to the staff almost. You're like, oh, we're gonna try this, but at the end of the day, it's there forever. So yeah, that can be definitely hard conversations to have.

Christopher Hutchins: 13:44

No, you're talking about some things that are incredibly important. And I don't know that people really think about the impact and the emotional toll that working in that kind of an environment would be like for a nurse. I think most of us have met nurses that are absolutely wonderful and they're always on top of things. They've always got a smile, but I don't know that I really realized until having conversations with you the what that looks like for them on a day-to-day basis because they are seeing some things that are very difficult.

Susie Brannigan: 14:19

Yeah, so I can say that I was, and I'm not tooting my own horn, I just know this because I can't think of a day that I ever snapped on a patient, really, and I'm proud of that. Did I get frustrated over things? Yeah, but I was good about even going into the bathroom and taking a breath. But I was really able to mask and hide how much all of this secondary trauma was affecting me by walking right into the room with a smile on my face and not letting it affect the patient. That's really hard to do. And I think that's why healthcare workers, especially in my generation, are really seeking a lot of therapy and all that, because we're like, wow, we have about 20 years of this, 25 years of this weighing on us, weighing on our hearts, weighing on our mind. And this is the first time we're really realizing, like, oh my God, 23 years with trauma three to four or five times a day happening. And that can be any unit. Emergency rooms, think about what they see every day. Oncology units, think about what they see. And you could say, oh, what about post-op? People are just getting their knee replacement or whatever. Well, maybe they hurt their knee permanently and they were a star athlete and now they're never gonna play again. That's traumatic for them. And how are you supporting them in that? So it was an unguided 20-something years of how to manage patients, and people, if you're gonna become a manager, that are themselves going through some PTSD of what they've seen. So you'll see people that cannot hold it in at the bedside and they kind of show their frustration. And that's why just culture is important in that aspect because I would have some staff sometimes that would show their frustration to the patient. But with just culture, you want to make sure you're bringing that person in with no judgment first and saying, you know, what happened today in room 10? Not I heard that you yelled at patient so-and-so. What's wrong with you type of thing? And I know that sounds harsh, but people talk like that, unfortunately. So my approach would have been, Sally, tell me what happened on the night shift last night. Did you have an okay shift? And that usually brings up, oh, you heard about what happened. And I'm like, well, let me hear your side though. And you use the gentle, non-judgmental approach. And you'll get a lot more out of someone because they know you're not there to just immediately, it's called the whack-a-mole syndrome, that you're not there to just be like, well, you're written up because you yelled at patient ABC, right? So yeah, it takes a lot of work, a lot of support. And that's why with AI coming, we have to remember that at the end of the day, most staff that are coming to work are mentally exhausted, but they love what they do. And if you're gonna introduce something new, you wanna make them feel empowered and you want them to feel like they have a choice per se. I know most of these systems come and they're gonna stay. But take feedback, do surveys. I used to send out little Google surveys to my staff, anonymous, just so they didn't have to feel like they had their name on it, about the Epic rollout or when we did hourly rounding rollouts, leader rounding rollouts, all that stuff. You gotta have shared governance.

Christopher Hutchins: 17:49

This is really important stuff. I can't even overstate this. I think it's really interesting that you're doing something even in the steel industry, kind of goes to the heart of what we're talking about in terms of the trust erosion. Doesn't matter what industry we're talking about, these things really need to be addressed across the board and for leadership. To hear this from you, I think, is a really important and valuable perspective.

Susie Brannigan: 18:19

Yeah. I mean, it's fairly a foolproof system if you utilize a just culture environment and trauma-informed care environment. Because, like I think we've discussed before, I've had staff that we've coached and coached and worked through the just culture algorithm and they still couldn't really get it right, whether it was behavioral or practice. And at the end of the day, if unfortunately their mistakes were just repetitive and it was causing a lot of harm, or they weren't learning from it or they couldn't change. I have staff that still talk to me to this day that are like, if you never let me go, I would never have learned that what I was doing was really wrong. And now I'm in therapy, or now I only work in hospice because I found that I like to work independently and not in a team, and that's okay too, right? So some people are great on a team. Some people want to work independently, and there's a place for everybody in healthcare, really.

Christopher Hutchins: 19:17

So you said that emotional intelligence should sit alongside data literacy in the conversations we've had before. It's a core competency that you believe that leaders need to have. I agree with you, by the way. How do you teach that as a leader in a tech-driven environment?

Susie Brannigan: 19:32

Okay. So it's really hard to teach emotional intelligence, right? You can't really teach someone to be empathetic. I had a nurse once tell me when I worked in the ICU with children, she used to say, Susie, you have a heart of gold. She's like, I am cold as ice. And I was like, what? And she's like, well, I just don't, I do this work because I can handle it and I don't take it home with me. And I'm like, are you saying I do? And she's like, no, I can just tell you really are beyond passionate about that. I said, well, there's positives and negatives to that too. You can be overly emotional and it can affect your personal life, right? Like I had to sometimes take a step back and think, after my shift, riding the train home, like, wow, I spent way too much time in that room today. And I neglected, not neglected, but I spent an hour in this room and only 20 minutes in this room. And there's a lot of guilt that comes up in nursing of like, did I spend enough time with everybody? Emotional intelligence has so many dimensions, it's like a spectrum, right? You can have zero emotional intelligence and that's going to be pretty bad, right? But you can have a little bit and you work on certain things and you have skills in other ways. And as long as you're open to learning about what's rubbing people the wrong way, rubbing patients the wrong way, then there's a positive outlook for you. But emotional intelligence itself is hard to teach, but trauma-informed language and therapeutic communication is something that can be taught. And it's really about the individual being willing to learn. So if you have no emotional intelligence and you won't sit down with me in my office and talk about it, I can't help you. The key to people being able to be at their best at work is being open to feedback, right?

Christopher Hutchins: 21:33

Let me go a little bit deeper on the topic of empathy. And this is a strange area for me because I'm feeling like there should be some guardrails that we put in place so that we don't even try to make AI seem so human that people get comfortable right away and trust it. Because I think we already have a problem in that area with the way people are being able to engage directly so easily with people across the planet. Social media has so many hooks into it that people are really easily trusting things that they just shouldn't. So from a nursing perspective, what do you think we need to know to really design AI solutions with regard to presence, empathy, and situational awareness? Because these are to me just inherently human. I don't know that we want to mess with that in AI, but someone's going to for sure.

Susie Brannigan: 22:29

Right. So I think there's a happy medium with AI when it comes to caring for the patient and being gentle with the staff and how much dedication they have to their own trade, right? They come into work, they have their routine and they have their way that they do things. And now here is this new product we're using. We have to make sure when designing these products that there is empathy involved, but not so much empathy that the computer or the robot is taking over the human factor that is the next step. So a good example of that is people that have been using simple ChatGPT or Claude almost as a therapist or to vent about really serious mental and emotional health issues. AI can take it a step too far where it should have these things in place where it says, you know what, it's been wonderful talking with you. I can see that you're really struggling. Here are some crisis hotlines that I'd like you to check in with because I have to stop here. I'm not a healthcare professional. And these apps do give you crisis hotlines and all that too. But they do that way far in. We've even had, I think everyone's heard of the family that is suing a certain company for the fact that their son was almost encouraged to end his life through AI because AI probably thought it was being supportive, but it was actually supporting the child's urge to do it. And we need to make sure that doesn't happen. It's important that when engaging with AI that you feel supported, you feel empowered, but you don't feel like it's completely making all the decisions for both you as the patient and the caregiver. Because I'm sure somewhere down the road, and I think it's probably already out there, patients are gonna be interfacing with an AI something at the bedside. I guarantee it's gonna be around discharge teaching, right? Someone's gonna wheel in a computer and say, you're gonna be discharged at 4 p.m. today. You're gonna sit here for a few minutes if you don't mind, and I'm gonna have our AI assistant go over your discharge paperwork, right? But then what happens when there's questions? That system may not be ready to answer those questions. And a lot of those questions may be very emotionally driven. So we just have to have a happy medium. I have some really awesome friends and colleagues, because we are great friends through LinkedIn this year, both entrepreneurs. His name is Timmy and Courtney, and they are creating what's called Compathia. And they are specifically looking to create a product where nursing students that are working in sim labs and training during college and even for a new job as a new nurse to have the robot help support them in how to deal with crisis mental health situations, which is phenomenal because when I was a student nurse and became a new nurse, I didn't really have any preparation for what I was going to see. I'm actually writing a book right now on my entire career and what I kind of went through blindly at first because colleges back then really focused on anatomy, physiology. Nobody ever talked about actual mental health as much as they should have. But I think the crisis has risen over the years for sure. But thankfully now we have people like Timmy and Courtney who are really trying to create that hard stop right out of college or during school of like, I get that you're gonna walk into a room and have a patient that attempted suicide. Let's talk about what that may look like. And then they may have that mannequin talk to them and say, I'm really thinking about ending my life. And then the student has interaction with that without having to do it in person with a real patient first, right? Imagine walking into your first assignment on a unit as a new nurse and having the assignment be, oh, you're gonna go in and today you have two patients, and one was involved in a car bombing in Iraq, and he has head-to-toe gauze and wounds and is not able to eat or drink. And then in this room, you're gonna have a girl who managed to sneak past her dad after school and hang herself. You could have those two kids at once and not know how to handle that at all because you didn't get the training or teaching around that. Utilizing these mannequins to proactively support you and how you would handle that situation when you walk into it. Because I know I personally walked into those situations blindly, and I gave that example as real examples. So I did have two patients at the same time with those types of situations and I got through it. I feel like I did a great job. I'm proud of myself, but man, do I wish that I had had more education and just preparation and practice around these situations. When I think back to nursing school and clinicals, I don't remember a single clinical where my instructor really was grabbing me in the hallway after a difficult patient interaction or anything. It was always around med administration, making sure there were no air bubbles in the tubing, did you put the Foley correctly at the bedside and all that stuff is extremely important. But there was a lot of focus on the physiological stuff and the equipment than there was on the actual human interaction and what to expect in certain situations. I just think back and I'm like, wow, some of the stuff I got through with zero preparation was insane.

Christopher Hutchins: 29:07

I think that's what makes your voice so important at this point in time because of where we are. This is the biggest transformation that I think any of us have ever seen in our lifetimes. There's no question about that.

Susie Brannigan: 29:17

That's awesome. Yeah. I'm an open book about my journey and my trauma and PTSD. I wouldn't change a thing in the world. I wouldn't go back and not work anywhere I worked. I landed everywhere I did for a reason. But what I do plan on doing for the rest of my career is making sure that as many nurses and techs and any healthcare worker that I come across feels the support and safety that I didn't really get because it can make or break your life sometimes too, right? I've managed to lead a very productive, happy life with marriage, children, all that, and I'm happy. But there are people that the trauma is so bad in healthcare that they can't maintain relationships or substance abuse happens and even suicide. The suicide rates and self-harm rates for healthcare workers are skyrocketing. The number is terrible, and we need to really hone in on that.

Christopher Hutchins: 30:18

So as we're kind of wrapping things up, first of all, this has been amazing for me. I think we could talk for hours.

Susie Brannigan: 30:26

We have.

Christopher Hutchins: 30:27

Right. But if you could give a piece of advice to leaders around emotional readiness and how to manage and lead with this AI transformation, what would you talk to them about?

Susie Brannigan: 30:38

I would definitely start with getting out onto your unit or whatever type of floor that you're managing. And don't just round and ask how people's day is, you'll see a lot of rounding, but the rounding can be very obvious that it's actually checking if people are doing their work and things like that. You want to make sure when you're rounding that it's genuine and that you're asking people, do you need boots on the ground help? Like I used to wear a suit, but I wore a cheap suit because I was a leader, but then I also wanted to get my hands dirty if staff needed help. And then I knew that suit could get washed or thrown out. So you always want to be ready and willing to go into a room and help a staff member. To my own detriment, sometimes I would go into rooms of patients that had been historically very difficult and staff needed a break. And I would say, don't worry, I got it. I'm gonna go in there and I'll spend some time with her. And I felt like I did a good job. It was my jam. I loved going in and talking to people that needed help mentally, but it does take a toll on you. So I would say to the leader, helping out and supporting, but not also taking on a ton of the burden. You have to equalize the load, basically. And just really asking people, how can I help you? Spreading the work out, making sure everything's fair, making sure your team leaders are solid and not just because they're looking to make an extra couple of dollars an hour. Because I've had people that are like, oh, I want to be charge nurse. And I'm like, are you doing it for the money or because you want to help? Because there's a difference between a charge nurse that's in it to help the team or for extra money. So really choosing your sub-leaders wisely is very important. And that will help as well during implementation of new products or new applications, because if you have charge nurses and team leaders that also believe in it, you're gonna go farther. But just be kind, have a genuine positive attitude despite if stuff's hitting the ceiling, you need to maintain your emotions. I consider myself a pretty emotional person in certain aspects, but when it comes to chaos and crisis, that shuts off and I become like a machine of how can I help you, what do you need. You need to be ready for anything as a leader and not have a fight or flight mode look on your face. Because if you look scared, the staff are gonna be like, oh my God, well, Susie's scared. What's really happening here? You kind of have to put on a brave face and just be in it for the right reason. Make sure that you're in management for the right reason. Because people will see it if it's not the right reason.

Christopher Hutchins: 33:37

That's a really important thing to be pointing out, and people need to not lose sight of that. So as people have been listening to you this morning, they may have some thoughts and ideas of perhaps how you might be able to help them. How can people get in touch with you? Where can they learn about what you're doing and how it can apply to whatever industry, even as I've just learned, not just a healthcare issue we're dealing with.

Susie Brannigan: 34:04

Yes. It's a people crisis. The world is filled with people in every industry that are just overloaded with everything. Technology can be amazing, but it also can take over our lives too. Doom scrolling, all of that can lead to depression. So yeah, you can reach me on LinkedIn. I have my regular page, just Susie Brannigan on LinkedIn. And then I do have my new business page, Susie Brannigan Consulting, that I encourage you to follow. On both pages, I post similar stuff because I have followers on both, and it's important to get out to every industry what I'm doing and trying to achieve. On my consulting page, I put in examples of assessments that I do. Some of the things that I do is, if your organization is not sure what's going on on your unit, whether it's behavioral issues, just general practice issues, I do these assessments tailored to your type of unit. So if it's oncology, it's tailored to that. If it's emergency room, it's tailored to that. If it's the steel industry, it's tailored to that. So we would do a full assessment, anonymous. Either the leaders can take it for taking a pulse on what the current atmosphere is like, the culture. And then it's also for the staff. Hand out a hundred assessments to your staff and have them hand them in anonymously. If you are open to change and willingness, you should be ready to hear whatever, right? You should be ready to hear that people aren't happy about their lunch breaks or people aren't happy about whatever. I've had some success really being able to chime in and hone in on themes and repetitive answers and then work with the leader to create a game plan of how we're going to implement change. I also do just culture training, trauma-informed training, and when you're building a team from the ground up, I love doing that. I just did a talk in New Hampshire at Saint Anselm on what nurse leaders need to know about trauma-informed care and also smart hiring. The DNA of the company. I can kind of cover leadership in any realm. So if you're looking to hire with heart and not just look at a resume and say, oh, they have a 4.0, they look great. I'm your person to talk to because I was able to manage units with people that never even had a college degree, and they were the best caregivers that I've ever had the pleasure of managing. I do one-on-one support to anybody that's going through trauma or PTSD in the workforce, maybe even left their job and don't even know where to go next. I am doing that type of support as well. So it's kind of a gamut of things, but basically I just want to help healthcare staff in any way I can, really.

Christopher Hutchins: 37:13

That's amazing. Susie, it's been fun to have a conversation with you. We always enjoy exploring these really interesting topics. Thanks again for taking the time to chat with me this morning and can't wait to have you back. And also I can't wait to hear what you're doing next, because it just seems like things are going great.

Susie Brannigan: 37:34

They are. When it rains, it pours in a good way, right?

Christopher Hutchins: 37:37

That's a great thing.

Susie Brannigan: 37:38

Sometimes there's a lull of stuff and you're like, oh, am I doing things right? And then you're like, oh, okay, I can't even keep up with all these requests, so it's nice. Because I'm doing truly what I was put on earth to do. I couldn't be at the bedside anymore. I felt like I put my time in and I needed to be at home, and I'm just loving it because I'm able to manage myself and really help people all day long. So it's amazing.

Christopher Hutchins: 38:04

That is very awesome. Appreciate that. That's it for this episode of the Signal Room. If today's conversation sparks something in you, an idea, a challenge, or perspective worth amplifying, I'd love to hear from you. Message me on LinkedIn or visit SignalRoomPodcast.com to explore being a guest on an upcoming episode. Until next time, stay tuned, stay curious, and stay human.