P2 Role - Staff/team support; as psychologist and Director of SJH's Employee Assistance Program which part of SJH's VOISS team.
Marc has been after me to get something posted. In all honesty I have put this as a lower priority because of not being directly involved in providing services for the grant.
As most of my professional career to be helping individuals, families, work teams and organizations figure out how to look at and engage their problems in more effective ways, the issues and challenges that the P2 have been engaging with are very familiar. Of course there is a danger to thinking that you have already seen it all, one can blind one self to new possibilities. On the other hand there is a reason that the saying "putting old wine in new bottles" is still around.
I do believe that P2 is participating in a social experiment which has the potential for significantly changing health care. What actual may be the outcome I am less certain. Future social historians may just see it as a subtext in what I consider one of the greatest social transformations in human history, the full integration of women and the human female perspective in all levels of participation, decision making and structuring of society's institutions. This is not to lesson the contributions of all the brilliant men who are involved with RWJ, but the decentralized health care network/system which P2 is trying to create is being built by, run by, and will used, mostly by women.
Traditional health care institutions were originally designed and run by men with the human male perspective on organizational structure, motivation and social relationships. All social institutions are built and function as a result of agreements between individuals and groups of individuals. Agreements are possible because we can create mental models for future behavior our self and others. So they are based on mental models of "self" and "other. I believe that men and women have two fundamentally different foundations for their mental models of "self" and "other.
The difference is due to the biology of human reproduction. Women have physical/psychological potential to experience the "self" become the "other". Whether women ever become mothers or not a key developmental task in childhood is to prepare for this experience. This is what playing with dolls is all about. This possibility creates a fundamentally different experience of "self" in relationship to "other"
We men have neither the physical reality, nor the the psychological potential, for the existential experience of our physical "self" becoming "other" i.e. gestating, giving birth and raising children. Therefore our experience of "self" and "other" is always fundamentally different than a women's. Since men have been the architects of most human institutions, men's mental models for relationships underlys all social systems that men have created, which is pretty much most of societies created in the last 50,000 years since humans evolved to use language and therefore complex, human culture.
What kinds of social institutions, and more specifically for us, what kinds medical systems, could be developed with women as active, equal partners in the creation of the social agreements and in the dynamics of the social interactions? We probably won't see the complete potential realized for a few generations, if this particular social experiment take hold, because all the women today have been socialized in male created institutions. But I believe that the solutions for the health care crisis exist in building different mental models for the 'self"/"other" agreements. Humans have tried building social systems based n the human male's mental models for the givens underlying the agreements. Maybe it is time to try the other perspective for awhile, to listen to the mothers.
