The affirming words on the wall are painted in bright colors and embellished with rainbows, sunbursts and stars: “Believe in Yourself!” “Smart, Strong, Fearless!” and “Anything is Possible.” Amid the inspiring exhortations hang two large bulletin boards, filled with polaroid snapshots of smiling young Johns Hopkins patients. All have scoliosis, or curvature of the spine. Some stand proudly, modeling their back braces. In one shot, a grinning girl poses in a field goal stance, as if about to kick her brace. The photo was taken after her final visit.
“We often see children and parents lingering over the photographs with smiles on their faces, and when we ask if they want their picture added to the board, the children are eager and excited,” says Kristen Venuti, a nurse practitioner who worked with physician assistants Karen Wille and Alison Dyszel to create and install the boards at three outpatient pediatric orthopedic locations.
The trio’s project is just one of two dozen made possible last year by the CIM’s Center for Humanizing Medicine (CHM) through its impact grant program. The idea behind the grants, totaling up to $1,500 each, is that small ideas can have an outsized effect on patients’ lives, says Martha Abshire Saylor, the Mary Ousley CIM Scholar and the first CIM nurse scholar, who is leading the impact grant effort.
Based on survey feedback from recipients of the first round of CHM impact grants, many participants are finding ways to make their piloted efforts sustainable, says Abshire Saylor. Buoyed by that success, she and her team put out a call for proposals and funded a new round of promising proposals this fall.
“Once again, the project ideas we received from interdisciplinary teams across Johns Hopkins, all aimed at improving the patient experience in creative ways, were absolutely inspiring,” says Abshire Saylor, who is stewarding the effort together with Scott Wright, director of the Miller Coulson Academy of Clinical Excellence and holder of The Anne Gaines and G. Thomas Miller Professorship, and Mary Catherine Beach, co-leader of the Center for Humanizing Medicine. Both Wright and Beach are Mary Gallo CIM Scholars.
“Once again, the project ideas we received from interdisciplinary teams across Johns Hopkins, all aimed at improving the patient experience in creative ways, were absolutely inspiring.” – Martha Abshire Saylor
The dozen projects funded for 2025–2026 will touch patients and families from The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, to Howard County General Hospital in Columbia, Maryland, to All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida.
They include an initiative with the apt acronym HUSSH (for Healing Using Soothing Sounds in the Hospital) that will bring white noise machines to the comprehensive transplant unit to give adult patients a more restful environment for recovery, as well as a monthly “caregiver café” that will offer monthly dinners for patients (and their families) undergoing long hospitalizations for cellular therapy. And in the neurocritical care unit, an initiative spearheaded by music therapist Kerry Devlin will create legacy keepsake kits for families whose loved ones die while in care.
The impact grants were inspired by the earlier success of CIM’s “pyramid grants” program, launched in 2011, which Cynthia Rand — the Mary Gallo CIM Scholar (2022) and an active member of the Center for Humanizing Medicine — oversaw at Bayview.
Abshire Saylor says that the outpouring of proposals that have come in from all corners of the Johns Hopkins Health System is evidence that staff and clinicians of all stripes — nurses, doctors, technicians, social workers, unit staff — are eager to embrace and further the work of CIM’s Center for Humanizing Medicine.
“The Center is focused on transforming the patient experience by promoting empathy, trust, and dignity, and ensuring each patient is known as a person rather than just a case,” she says. “These projects really are the cornerstone of that mission.”
