Fall thoughts: What do Halloween and Healthcare Have in Common?

Fall thoughts: What do Halloween and Healthcare Have in Common?
By: Terri Schmitt PhD, APRN, FNP-BC, FAANP
Executive Director, NPACE

I love Halloween! I absolutely, unapologetically love it. I love it so much that my zombie-prom annual event has become renown in recent years. I am giddy the clock is ticking closer to this best of holidays. I really want to write about Halloween as we approach fall. To prepare for this newsletter I completed a quick google search of ‘Halloween and Healthcare’ and was not prepared for the sheer amount of fright I would experience from this action.  Looking up Halloween and Healthcare produces loads of frightening articles about food allergies from trick or treats, Halloween injuries, and how horrific the entire holiday is in the ER, primarily for children and teens.  Uber amounts of caution and woe abound in healthcare and Halloween information.  Reading further I learned how Halloween costumes feed anxieties, fear,  bullying, and danger! How could my favorite holiday be an event of such high caution?

For me, Halloween is beautiful and empowering. It is a night of fun, imagination, gaining superpowers or being braver in a different costume. Anyone can try out a new accent or personality, be creative, and knock on a neighbors’ door, having them knock on yours to meet you without it being odd. Halloween signifies giving to others who are not relatives or even known to you, its community in a way no other holiday is and its genuine community. Halloween is kindness, fun, and preparing for winter. We can celebrate the creativity in each other with the art and ideas we wear, excitement and curiosity, and even with the ‘being scared’.  It's about an undercurrent of happiness and joy. Halloween is a chance to explore the possible and perhaps even the impossible… and to be quite frank the idea of magic or being a superhero to help people is exactly part of why I love healthcare so much! 

However, circling back to my Google search had me further pondering the idea of fear related to Halloween and Healthcare. Is everything in healthcare truly frightening? Most of it, to be quite frank, is scary for both clinicians and patients. Long wait times, lack of primary care providers, high deductibles, meds not covered from one year to the next, crowded emergency rooms, soaring costs and people at their most vulnerable in the midst of the fear. If the beast of healthcare itself, a place meant to be for help and healing, is frightening just by its construction… to go a step further, how much do we make that worse as healthcare providers? How much of the information we disseminate, from media to exam rooms, creates fear? We advise people and create plans of care and motivate by describing or cautioning on the worst outcome. We speak constantly of new complications, rising illness rates, and dire straits in the system.  

I would challenge us to share more of the Halloween spirit in joy and good news. For example, instead of pedaling exercise to combat chronic illness and death, we discuss the sheer joy of moving your body and the bliss experienced post movement. Let’s tout when major disease number go down or celebrate something our patients are doing correctly.

Here are some ideas to begin to be the change and bring back the magic of healthcare to our patients. 
-    Spread good news to colleagues and patients. (Not overt forced positivity, but actual good news from healthcare. We         do have it! Some examples include price controls on insulin and inhalers, to a drop in HIV deaths in the last 2                   decades.)
-    Practice joy in yourself. Celebrate you and love you in one way every day. 
-    Embrace imagination and the idea of magic, in the spirit of Halloween be open to what could be! 

Finally, I personally invite you to fill your professional cup, celebrate your work, and join us to celebrate you and Halloween at our October Cape Cod Conference where you can build monsters on day 1, because who says that is not fun? Learn about potions and spells (functional medicine and pharmacology learning) and celebrate the great color black with ACDC vibes. If there is one place to think about fall, Halloween, and play a bit, it’s our October Cape Cod Conference. For all of you who love Halloween like I do!