�ʼһ���

Never camera shy, therapy dog Sadie strikes a pose with employees at The Wright Center for Community �ʼһ��� Scranton Practice: Dr. Caitlin McCarthy, dentist; Brianna McCarthy, community health worker; Aimee Wechsler, director of government affairs; Shannon Osborne, project manager; and Rebeka Donovan, clinical support aide.

Sadie, a cute and gentle canine, offers ‘happy boost’ to busy health care professionals and support staff

To promote employee wellness, The Wright Center for Community �ʼһ��� recently added a new member to the team: She works like a dog and gets rewarded mainly with handfuls of Cheerios.

“If you watch Sadie interact with the staff, you immediately see their body language soften, you see their faces soften, you see grown men on the floor talking baby talk to an animal,” says Finegan. “I don’t know how many times we’ve heard, ‘I really needed this today.’”

The Wright Center introduced the program in November 2023 and refers to it as “animal-enabled wellness services.”

Finegan and Sadie travel monthly to the nonprofit organization’s clinics in Lackawanna, Luzerne, and Wayne counties. During each hour-long visit, employees are invited to drop by a conference room or other non-public area for a few minutes of Sadie time, dispensing gentle pats, pets, scratches, and snuggles – but no ruff-housing!

“If people need a little reprieve or a happy boost, they can take a moment away from their desks and interact with Sadie,” says Allison LaRussa, associate vice president for health humanities, trauma-informed sanctuary frameworks, and justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging at The Wright Center. “It makes you instantly feel good.”

When Sadie struts into a clinic, she often draws a crowd of admirers, many of them snapping cellphone photos like paparazzi at a Taylor Swift sighting. Fans gawk and talk. Look at her long eyelashes. Is that a new bandana she’s wearing? Oh my gosh, she has a Wright Center ID badge with her name on it!

But beneath the fuss and fun – including the distribution of dog treats – lies a serious purpose for the pooch’s presence.

The health care industry is coping with workforce challenges, including employee burnout and high turnover. The troubles intensified in hospitals and other health care settings during the COVID-19 outbreak. But they reflect a malaise impacting many modern U.S. workplaces in which people wrestle with anxiety, depression, and other behavioral health issues that can contribute to physical illness as well as poor productivity and job dissatisfaction.

The Wright Center’s leadership team has introduced a range of long- and short-term initiatives, each demonstrating its commitment to promoting employee wellness.

These efforts include ongoing participation in the Sanctuary Institute’s model for organizational change, which gives workers the tools to improve their daily interactions with colleagues and others and to create a safer, trauma-informed workplace. Employees can also access a whole-person wellness blog, mindfulness sessions, art sessions, and other support, such as Sadie’s visits.

The intent is to foster good health and resiliency among The Wright Center’s staff and the many professionals who train within its clinics, including resident and fellow physicians, physician assistants, �ʼһ��� assistants, and others.

“If our clinicians are not well, how do we provide the best care for our patients? We simply cannot,” explains LaRussa. “So, allowing even a few minutes during a workday for some of these wellness initiatives to help people process – or to help them relax or whatever they might need – is really beneficial.”

‘Quick fix to a bad day’

“Sadie is a quick fix to a bad day,” says Finegan. “She brings that tail-wagging, panting, unconditional love that just makes everything OK.”

Finegan, 48, is a longtime patient of Dr. Linda Thomas-Hemak, president and CEO of The Wright Centers for Community �ʼһ��� and �ʼһ��� Medical Education. Finegan initially asked to bring the dog to her doctor’s appointments at the Mid Valley Practice in Jermyn purely for her personal support. Later, the two women discussed possibly engaging Sadie in a bigger mission.

“It just kind of snowballed into Sadie doing staff support,” Finegan says.

Elsewhere, therapy dogs have been used on college campuses and in schools to decrease students’ stress before pressure-filled exams. Similarly, the Lehigh Valley �ʼһ��� Network has enlisted therapy dogs at its COVID-19 vaccine clinic to ease the minds of worried children, and the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia sometimes opens its campus doors to a therapy dog to spread positivity among staff and patients.

Beyond health care settings, therapy dogs have been spotted serving in airports. At the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport, for example, participants in the all-volunteer Therapy Animals Integrating Less Stress, or TAILS, program serve to decrease humans’ tensions while they wait for takeoff.

‘An amazing contributor’

Sadie might expand her scope of service to more places in the future, Finegan says. For now, however, the duo is focused on learning the ins and outs of The Wright Center’s primary and preventive care clinics, such as which employees will permit Sadie’s face-licking “kisses” and which prefer to keep their distance.

Sadie recognizes commands such as “leave it” – to disregard a pill or other item accidentally dropped on the floor, for instance – and “place” – to remain seated in a particular spot. However, this therapy dog seemingly needs no verbal prompt to do what she does best: radiate happiness.

“Sadie is an amazing contributor to our household,” says Finegan. “We’re just grateful that she can now do that out in the world.”

For more information about The Wright Center for Community �ʼһ���, call 570-230-0019 or visit TheWrightCenter.org.

Wright Center Internal Medicine resident physician Dr. Lekha Yadukumar presented scholarly research in December on the demographics and disparities in Large Granular Lymphocyte (LGL) Leukemia at the American Society of Hematology’s 65th Annual Meeting and Exposition in San Diego, California.

The third-year resident, who plans to pursue a career in hematology-oncology, worked with a University of Nebraska Medical Center hematology-oncology fellow to perform a retrospective cohort study of the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database for patients diagnosed with the rare blood cancer from 2000-2020. They analyzed statistics on patient demographics, year of diagnosis, and timeline of treatment. Dr. Nirali Patel, core faculty with The Wright Center for �ʼһ��� Medical Education’s Internal Medicine Residency and associate program director of The Wright Center for �ʼһ��� Medical Education’s Geriatrics Fellowship, served as the study’s faculty mentor.

The study examined statistics from 2,589 patients, with a median age of 67 years and 52.7% being men. In addition, 81.5% were Caucasians, 9.6% were African Americans, and 5.3% were Asians/Pacific Islanders, followed by 2% Hispanics and 1.5% American Indians.

Nearly 92% of those included in the study were diagnosed after 2010, leading Dr. Yadukumar to note the increasing incidence over the last decade.

This isn’t Dr. Yadukumar’s first time exploring racial disparities in cancer research. She served as the lead researcher in a study that found Black men were diagnosed with breast cancer at a later age and had a higher mortality rate compared to white men. The findings were presented in a research poster at the 2023 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Breast Cancer Annual Congress in Berlin, Germany.

She worked on that study with several other doctors, including fellow Wright Center for �ʼһ��� Medical Education Internal Medicine Resident Dr. Amninder Singh. The study’s findings drew media attention, including an article in MD Edge, an online magazine dedicated to hematology and oncology news.

Additionally, Dr. Yadukumar was inspired to study esophageal cancer hospitalizations in the transgender population after meeting a patient at The Wright Center for Community �ʼһ���’s Ryan White HIV/AIDS Clinic. She utilized the national inpatient sample database from 2015-2020 for her study.

Together with Wright Center Cardiovascular Disease Fellow Dr. Yaser Khalid and several other doctors and resident physicians from across the country, Dr. Yadukumar analyzed mortality, length of hospital stays, and total hospital costs for 212,425 patients, including 97,950 transgender patients. The research team presented their findings at the European Society for Medical Oncology’s World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer in Barcelona, Spain.

“Our study showed transgender patients had a 5.1 times increased risk of death. They had increased total hospital costs and longer length of stays compared to the general population,” she said. “Our takeaway was that there is a significant difference in outcomes when we compare transgender people to the general population. While cis-gender differences in cancer prevalence and outcomes are well investigated, there is a need to study transgender populations to understand the existing disparities in their outcomes.”

Through her research on this project, Dr. Yadukumar found the option to document a patient as transgender is not available in most cancer databases. “The health care system is truly biased against this population in our community, and there is a need to actively work on bridging this gap from a clinician perspective, as well as with research,” she added.

The Wayne County commissioners and The Wright Center for Community �ʼһ��� have teamed up to expand access in two rural locations to free, nutritious food for individuals and families facing food insecurity and hunger.

The county’s Food Pantry Program recently began supplying nonperishable items to two of The Wright Center’s primary and preventive care clinics: Hawley and North Pocono.

Clinic employees will hand out the county-provided food boxes – each containing about 25 pounds of shelf-stable items such as soups, pasta, canned vegetables, tuna, and chicken – to patients who disclose on intake forms that they are in need. In addition, the clinics will periodically promote and hold larger-scale distribution events, called pop-up food pantries, during which boxes will be made available on a first-come, first-served basis to patients and members of the broader community.

The next pop-up food pantry at the Hawley Practice, 103 Spruce St., is scheduled for noon to 2 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 25. Volunteers from The Wright Center will coordinate the event and dole out the boxes. For more information about The Wright Center’s pop-up food pantries, contact Holly Przasnyski, director of The Wright Center for Patient & Community Engagement, at przasnyskih@TheWrightCenter.org, or call 570-209-3275.

Wayne County residents who utilize The Wright Center for Community �ʼһ��� North Pocono Practice, 260 Daleville Highway, Suite 103, Covington Township, are also eligible to receive county-provided food boxes.

“It is important to use funds wisely and target the need as best we can,” said Commissioner Cramer. “We are grateful that the Wright Center can help identify those that need this assistance and help them. No one with food insecurities can overcome health challenges, financial challenges, and employment challenges. We are grateful to the Wright Center for this extra support.”

Through the new arrangement, The Wright Center will be able to offer extra support and convenience to families who are struggling to afford quality foods for their tables, Przasnyski said.

She said that food assistance requests from under-resourced individuals, including senior citizens, have risen locally and nationally since May when the COVID-19 public health emergency declaration ended. Experts attribute the increased demand for food banks and related charitable programs to the federal government’s rollback of certain pandemic-era health and food benefits, such as emergency allotments to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

�ʼһ��� one out of every 20 households receiving SNAP benefits experienced food insufficiency after this year’s discontinuation of emergency allotments, according to a study released in August by the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Elsewhere, researchers have previously done studies linking food insufficiency with poor health outcomes, identifying it as a potential contributor to chronic conditions such as heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes.

These and other health impacts that people experience due to certain social and economic conditions are a prime focus of Przasnyski and others involved with The Wright Center for Patient & Community Engagement, known as PCE.

As a subsidiary of the nonprofit health center, PCE strives to help people in Northeast Pennsylvania overcome food insecurity and other non-�ʼһ��� issues that can affect their ability to focus on achieving and maintaining their maximum wellness. Those issues commonly include transportation barriers, lack of access to educational opportunities, homelessness, and poverty.

In rural Wayne County, where transportation and other quality-of-life issues require broad-based solutions, county government leaders have for more than a decade been working in collaboration with residents to strengthen the county’s human services safety net and support a prosperous community. They created Wayne Tomorrow!, a planning initiative to guide the county’s development.

The commissioners have encouraged The Wright Center’s involvement in Wayne Tomorrow!, welcoming input on task forces that address issues of mutual concern, such as how to assist residents who face transportation hurdles and how to implement solutions to the affordable housing crunch, Przasnyski said.

“The Wayne County commissioners are very active in trying to address the needs of the county’s residents, including those who are economically disadvantaged,” said Przasnyski, a Wayne County resident. “Many of the things they are doing align with The Wright Center’s mission, so we are glad to partner with them on initiatives to improve the health and well-being of the population.”