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- Kaitlyn ChaconBurn AmbassadorRoleResearch Coordinator of the Boston-Harvard Burn Injury Model SystemLocationBoston, MAFun Facts
Kaitlyn enjoys fishing and swimming and has challenged herself to take up running. She now has a new furry friend, Teddy, a mini golden doodle, to join her on her expeditions. Furthermore, she profoundly appreciates different languages and enjoys learning about other cultures.
Kaitlyn’s Burn Injury Journey
Kaitlyn volunteered for many years as a summer camp counselor and the most common burns she would see were sunburns. Although sunburns put a damper on summer activities for many, they provoked her to consider the effects of various burns. Today, Kaitlyn is one of the Boston-Harvard Burn Injuries Model System’s (BHBIMS) research coordinators. Through her work, she has witnessed the physical limitations of burn injuries and their effect on people long after they leave the hospital. Likewise, it can be difficult for people with burn injuries to access the resources and services they require outside the hospital for various reasons. The extent to which their lives have changed prompts the daily battle to “thrive, not just survive.” This mindset has helped many people look beyond their limitations and push toward achieving future possibilities. The burn community’s resilience drives Kaitlyn to advocate for fire safety, burn awareness, and overall health wellness. She is able to act as an advocate by hosting informational sessions for people at Mass General and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospitals. Furthermore, the BHBIMS team has shared fire safety, burn awareness, and overall health wellness with the local community elementary school, thus facilitating the dissemination of information at an earlier age in hopes that they, too, can help others.
Why does Kaitlyn think people should consider referring to the MSKTC resources?
What is excellent about MSKTC resources is they have a wide range of resources, so there is something for everyone. Kaitlyn has used burn injury resources to inform herself and provide information to burn survivors within her community. Helpful tips on sun protection, employment, and pain management post-burn injury can all be found on their website. The resources in English are great! Their Spanish resources have been great for her community as well. It often takes more work to find quality resources with good translations, but MSKTC is making this resource more accessible.
Why does Kaitlyn want to be an MSKTC ambassador?
Since beginning her burn researcher position, she has learned many things. The first is that individuals with burn injuries are survivors that can overcome victimization. Secondly, burn care goes beyond acute treatment; many must learn to manage their health independently! Thirdly, seeing firsthand how burn survivors adapt and overcome their challenges with the help of resources is genuinely inspiring. As a Spanish speaker, burn researcher, and aspiring clinician, becoming an ambassador for MSTKC will facilitate the dissemination of aid to the unapproached Spanish population in Massachusetts.
What has Kaitlyn done as a MSKTC ambassador?
Kaitlyn currently manages the social media platforms for BHBIMS and makes it a point to share as many MSKTC resources as possible. She has the unique opportunity to meet many burn survivors at affiliated hospitals and offer MSKTC post-injury care resources to them and their loved ones. The training on the MSTKC page has helped her better advocate for the burn population and reassure caregivers of burn survivors there are resources at their disposal. After receiving these resources, she has found that people tend to feel more confident about managing their burn-specific health even five years post-injury!
- Infocomics
- Leilani StoneBurn AmbassadorRoleCaregiver, ClinicianLocationCaliforniaFun Facts
Leilani has a fun spirit and is full of energy and enthusiasm. She likes to lighten very difficult situations by participating in the fun activities that she organizes for kids with burn injuries. Leilani continues to be very involved with the local community because, as she says, “sometimes it does take a village.”
Leilani is the mother of two boys. When her one son was 14-years old, he was burned in a propane gas explosion. He spent 3 weeks in the hospital and another year in recovery. Driven by her newfound passion to help burn survivors and their families, she left her career as a Program Manager for a detention center and began working as the director of Burn Survivor Services for the Burn Institute. She found MSKTC’s burn resources very beneficial for burn survivors and their families. Leilani incorporates these resources into the work she does now to help families in burn recovery.
Why does Leilani want to be an ambassador?
Leilani found MSKTC’s resources to be very clear and evidence-based, which has helped to inform her about her son’s recovery. As the Director of Burn Survivor Services at the Burn Institute, Leilani works to instill best practices on how to treat and manage burn injuries after clients are released from care, including managing the effects on families. She wants to continue disseminating MSKTC resources to burn survivors and their families in the burn community.
What has Leilani done as an ambassador?
At the Burn Institute and the University of California San Diego Health Regional Burn Center, Leilani works with the clinic’s social workers to disseminate MSKTC’s burn resources to clinicians and burn patients and their families. Wanting a way to condense all MSKTC’s information and make it easy for people to access, she designed a postcard with a QR code that links to the MSKTC burn resources page. She also emails patients and their families’ links to MSKTC’s resources. Leilani shares MSKTC’s Spanish resources with Spanish-speaking clients and the large Spanish-speaking community in her area, which has been helpful.
- Megan KinzlerBurn AmbassadorRoleSpeech-Language PathologistLocationCaliforniaFun Facts
Megan is a Pittsburgh native who now lives in the Bay Area of California. When she isn’t working, she enjoys reading, hiking, and singing. Understanding that laughter serves as its own form of medicine, Megan brings her sense of humor with her wherever she goes. She has a hard time sitting still and enjoys trying out new hobbies like woodworking and traveling as much as possible!
Megan’s Burn Injury Journey
While Megan has experience working in burn units, she feels her journey with burn injury (BI) truly started when she cared for a patient with over 44% total body surface area, with 3rd-degree burns to his face. His injury took his vision, and he needed multiple facial skin grafts and flaps, all of which severely impacted his ability to speak and swallow. This patient showed Megan how crucial the Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) role is to the BI population and how often their services may be overlooked for treatment and recovery. She began to better collaborate with her Physical/Occupational Therapists, attended burn unit rounds, and read about burns off the clock to maximize the care she could provide. Through her work, Megan developed a passion to help not only patients but help lead the SLP field of research and advocacy for the burn injury population.
Why does Megan think people should consider referring to the MSKTC resources?
Given her high involvement with patients with TBI, SCI, and Burn Injury, Megan finds the plethora of MSKTC’s resources to be directly relevant and beneficial for her patients. This user-friendly, free, research-based information is helpful for patients from all different backgrounds and is so easily accessible. She also loves how they have options for English and Spanish ready at the click of a button. Megan shares these resources with patients, families, and colleagues to better promote advocacy, healing, and care for her patients.
Why does Megan want to be an MSKTC ambassador?
Megan would like to be an MSKTC ambassador to promote available resources, improve patient care, improve patients’ confidence in returning home after the acute care journey has ended, and promote the role of the SLP in this patient population. She would also like to continue expanding her knowledge of burn injuries to best treat burn survivors and understand their medical complexities both in the acute stages and beyond.
What has Megan done as an MSKTC ambassador?
Megan has provided suggestions to MSKTC on how to further improve handouts and resources involving orofacial burns and stretching. She provides MSKTC resources to patients, shares handouts with coworkers, and works to increase awareness of all that MSKTC has to offer regarding burn injury, TBI, and SCI. She is currently working on ways to help advocate for the SLP role in burn care and feels as though these resources are helpful to patients and help her improve her knowledge and insight into the burn survivor’s journey through care and beyond.
- Peggy ReisherTBI AmbassadorRoleMSW; Executive Director for Brain Injury Alliance of Nebraska (BIA-NE); Chair of USBIA Board of TrusteesLocationLincoln, NEFun Facts
For her whole life, Peggy has had the pleasure of confusing her family and friends with the appearance of her identical twin, Penny. Penny and Peggy grew up sharing friends, a car, a room, and many memories. Peggy said they did everything together for the first 18 years of their life, and it was because of this she learned to be a team player, consider other’s perspectives, and work to compromise when at all possible. That, and the general environment of “Nebraska Nice” she was raised in has helped form her into the friendly person she is today. To add to her warm and fuzzy personality, Peggy loves to bake, spend time with her family, and take her dog, Percy, for long walks.
Peggy Reisher’s Experience with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)
Peggy attained her master’s in social work in Nebraska but began her work with individuals with brain injury while living in Indianapolis, IN after graduate school. When Peggy moved back to NE, Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital hired her to serve as the social worker in their brain injury unit. There, she spent the next 14 years helping patients and their families find support and services as they prepared to discharge from the rehabilitation unit.
In 2009, the Nebraska Dept. of Education used HRSA funds to support the development of a new non-profit which became BIA-NE, an organization aimed at helping individuals with brain injuries rebuild their lives, restore purposeful living, and rebuild hope and optimism beyond the hospital walls. Initially, Peggy was the program director for BIA-NE and took over as the executive director in 2013.
For the first eleven years, BIA-NE only had funding for two to three full-time staff and a contract worker. A milestone was met in 2019 when, after Peggy and fellow advocates had been lobbying for ten years, the “Brain Injury Trust Fund” legislation was passed, providing financing for TBI support, and expanding the staff to eight. This dramatically improved the support that BIA-NE could provide for the TBI community.
In 2019 Peggy was asked to be on the board of the United States Brain Injury Alliance (USBIA), only to then end up chairing the board.
Today, Peggy strives to broaden the support given to individuals with brain injury across the state. She does this by building systems capacity. Areas of focus for Peggy and her team are those individuals who are at higher-risk of having a brain injury. That includes justice-involved individuals, victims of domestic violence, veterans, and the aging population. Peggy and her team offer brain injury training to community-based programs, encouraging programs to screen their clients for brain injury. Once they identify those who screen positive, they ask those programs to refer those individuals to their brain injury resource facilitators which they have across the state.
What does Peggy Reisher think of the quality, usefulness, and user-friendliness of the MSKTC resources?
The MSKTC resources fill the void that has existed for those looking for the best knowledge of how to deal with the symptoms of their TBI. Small organizations don’t have the means to create the content needed to best educate people within the TBI community, but thanks to MSKTC, they don’t need to. As Peggy’s organizations track information in their database, the consistent issue raised with people with TBI is a struggle to find the information they need. Fortunately, Peggy finds that she is regularly able to find the resources needed through the MSKTC website. The factsheets are such a powerful tool, and the continued translation of resources into Spanish is invaluable. Even the info-comics serve a huge role for those users who are not the strongest readers.
Why does Peggy Reisher want to be an MSKTC ambassador?
Peggy feels like she has already been playing the role of an ambassador, with how often she proselytizes MSKTC resources. Signing up with MSKTC and making it official only made sense.
What has Peggy Reisher done as an MSKTC ambassador?
In her efforts to improve the quality of knowledge, Peggy always follows up her presentation with linking to the relevant MSKTC resources. Considering she performs anywhere from 30-50 presentations annually, there are plenty of opportunities where she can platform MSKTC. In her communities, Peggy notes regular occurrences of people continuing to share MSKTC resources after she has introduced them to the site. Within BIA-NE her staff regularly share relevant resources with clients and the community at large, and Peggy will even share links via email or Zoom when they are relevant to the recipient’s needs.
- Factsheets
- Factsheets