Relational Medicine Foundation

Relational Medicine at Work

A dramatic look a the Relational Medicine Foundation which promotes compassion and trust between Doctor and Patient. This documentry is a look at the important conversation between a patient and a doctor. This more human encounter between a Doctor and Patient has also been shown to have a more powerfully positively force in healing, leaving the Doctor and Patient feeling more fulfilled with their encounter.

A short piece capturing the work of the Relational Medicine Foundation. RFM uses theatre to help capture the illness experience.

 

Timeline

  • 2001 - First encounter between heart transplant patient Candace Moose (book author: A Grateful Heart) and heart transplant cardiologist Dr. Mario Deng at Columbia University.
  • 2005 - Initiation of encounter research at Columbia University and City University of New York in New York City by Dr. Mario Deng and Dr. Federica Raia.
  • 2009 - Proposal of Emotion Theatre to communicate stakeholder perspectives by Actress/Director Vanda Monaco-Westerstahl.
  • 2010 - Formulation of Emotion Theatre project with Director John Henry Davis and Opera Composer Conrad Cummings.
  • 2011 - Founding of Relational Medicine Foundation with Mario Deng , Federica Raia , Vanda Monaco Westerstahl , John Henry Davis  and additional Founding members Candace Moose, Jim Moose, Robert Milo and Amy Milo.  Emotion Theatre plays in New York City.
  • 2012 - Emotion Theatre Plays in Los Angeles after Dr. Deng’s and Dr. Raia’s move to UCLA.
  • 2013 - RelationalAct Workshops at UCLA (made possible by generous support from UCLA Health System CEO and President Dr. David Fenberg and UCLA Nursing Director Heidi Crooks) by Dr. Raia, Dr. Deng, John Henry Davis and Meredith Flynn (new RMF-Board Member).
  • 2014 - Publication of the book: Raia and Deng. Relational Medicine. Personalizing Modern Healthcare. The Practice of High-Tech Medicine as a RelationalAct. World Scientific Publishing/Imperial College Press 2014.
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The foundation evolved as a multistakeholder project in New York City (since 2009) and Los Angeles (since 2011) (with an ongoing documentary about its evolution).

SUPPORT THE RELATIONAL MEDICINE FOUNDATION (GOAL: 100,000)

The Relational Medicine Foundation, an IRS 501c3 non-profit organization, is dedicated to the study and implementation of the high quality RelationalAct, the “mindfully present” person-to-person encounter between patient and healthcare professional, as means of improving the humanism and effectiveness of medicine.  Key activities for the Relational Medicine Foundation, in close collaboration with UCLA, include:

  • Research/Education/Training

  • Artistic Integration of Art and Medicine

  • Corporate and Institutional Collaboration

  • Grant/Philanthropy Funding

  • Dissemination and Strategic Consulting

To support The Relational Medicine Foundation, we are requesting funding to:

  1. Endow a UCLA-Fellowship “Humanism in Advanced Heart Failure”

  2. Endow a Chair in “Humanism in High-Tech Modern Medicine”

  3. Endow the Relational Act Research and Education (RARE) Program/Center/Institute at UCLA.

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Our Board of Directors

 

Dr. Mario Deng

Professor Mario Deng, M.D., is a cardiologist, specialized in the care of patients with advanced heart failure, mechanical circulatory support devices and heart transplantation. After medical training in Germany and a postdoctoral cardiology research fellowship at Stanford University, he served as the Medical Director of the Interdisciplinary Heart Failure & Heart Transplantation Program at Muenster University (1992-2000), Director of Cardiac Transplantation Research at Columbia University (2000-2011), and between 2011 and 2016, Medical Director of the UCLA Integrated Advanced Heart Failure/Mechanical Support/Heart Transplant program.

Prof. Deng maintains a position at the intersection between clinical cardiology, teaching and translational research. Dr. Deng is Co-Principal Investigator of the Cardiac Allograft Rejection Gene Expression Observational (CARGO) study that led to the first-in-history US-FDA-cleared genomic organ transplantation rejection AllomapTM blood test and Principal Investigator of the NIH-NHLBI-project “Multidimensional Molecular Biomarkers of MultiOrgan Dysfunction after Mechanical Circulatory Support Therapy.”

Together with Prof. Federica Raia, he developed the Relational Medicine Theory with the core concept of the RelationalAct to improve the understanding and practice of modern medicine. In the context of this work, Prof. Deng is the co-founder and co-president, with Prof. Raia, of the Relational Medicine Foundation, a non-profit organization in support of the on-going collaboration among different stakeholders:  patients, caregivers, healthcare providers, education researchers and artists/theater professionals to improve the understanding and practice of high-tech modern medicine

 

Federica Raia

 Federica Raia is the co-founder of the foundation and faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles https://seis.ucla.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty-directory/federica-raia

 

Victoria Groysberg 

Victoria Groysberg graduated UCLA in 2014 and has been working in a lab ever since. Always sketching and painting growing up, Victoria gained a love of art at a young age and took art classes for 10 years. Through witnessing the suffering brought upon by heart disease on her grandparents and her art teacher of 10 years, she realized that introducing art therapy into the medical environment had great potential to benefit patient's recoveries. Through her exposure to the medical environment, she realized that the biomedical approach was not enough, and that a mechanism to build up patient's optimism and spirituality during their stay in the hospital needed to be introduced. This mechanism is the use of Relational Medicine and the use of the arts to assist patients in the healing process.  She aims to go to medical school and to incorporate these fundamental principles into her practice.

 
 

Clovette Coulter

Michael Coulter

 

Joe Gonzales

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“Requiring this text (and those I hope will follow) for intern level deliverers would elevate significantly training effectiveness in the USA and globally. Families facing the difficult processes of surgeries for the critically ill are assisted in the decisions only they can make.”
— Dr. Will
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