WHOM WE SERVE

All these groups would especially benefit from participating in IAMAZEBRA events together!!

Groups have used IAMAZEBRA workshops or events to

• Engage the broader community
• Create opportunities for people with similar healthcare experiences to bond, prompt conversation and action on behalf of members
• Provide opportunities for garnering continuing education credits (have acquired physical therapy CE credits for courses from NY, NJ, CT, CA)
• Meet accreditation competencies within entry-level medical and health professional education related to communications, ethics, inter-professional relationships and collaboration
• Fundraise

Improv Connections or stand-alone tailored performance piece to anchor and prompt conversation and relationship building amongst members. Improv workshop to learn skills in welcoming and engaging new members, or toward improving relationships and collaboration amongst patients, provider and payers.

As with patient support groups, but tailored to the challenges of family members rather than ‘patients’ themselves

Improv workshop to facilitate members knowing of and collaborating with each other; communication skills with political and legislative entities; supporting clinicians and researchers in the specific disease arena to better communicate with each other and the public about their specific issues; Tailored performance piece to educate the public about the needs of the groups they represent

Improv Connections and/or workshop to support students in learning skills in communication, relationship-building, collaborative decision-making and resilience...all critical to any doctoring practice (and generally required competencies)

Improv Connections and/or workshop to support communication, relationships and resilience within groups who inhabit the same workspace day after day; or just to have fun together; enhancement of practitioner/client encounters; communication skills to better engage alternative practitioners with standard medical practitioners

Improv workshop to facilitate knowing of each other; to more readily engage in inter-professional conversation, including alternative practitioners; communication skills as required with outside political entities; supporting clinicians and researchers in communicating with each other and the public; Improv Connections  social event within a conference setting; Tailored performance piece to educate the public about the profession or as part of a conference experience, or fundraising

Improv workshops with eclectic groups of players who have variant roles within the systems – professional practitioners, administrators & administrative personnel, technical staff, support staff (facilities management, logistics, billing, IT, housekeeping, dietary), or within specific departments, to come to appreciate variant perspectives and discern better ways to communicate and problem solve; finding new, different and meaningful ways to better understand all the stakeholders that the system serves and relies upon; come to appreciate the humanity of everyone

 Improv workshop with administrators to facilitate collaboration and idea generation to address the ongoing challenges and ever-present changes in imposed rules; Stand-alone tailored performance piece as a stress relief for employees and/or clients or a mechanism to better engage the community; Presentation on improv in medical education for professional practitioners who engage in entry-level clinical professional education

Improv workshops to enhance communication skills of researchers amongst members and with groups outside of research - professionals, administrators, payers, consumers of healthcare and legislators

Through research and experience, IAMAZEBRA recognizes that the world of healthcare presents with unique challenges to communication, relationship-building, collaborative decision making and resilience - objectives sought by most industries when employing improv as a tool to support teamwork, learning, innovation and change.

• A major portion of the stakeholders - consumers of healthcare or patients - are inherently, exceptionally vulnerable, ill-informed and desperate; often creating this new relationship, not by choice, but because their life or independence is threatened. 
• Families of consumers are often - whether they like it or not - pulled into  the patient’s healthcare issue. 
• Providers are socially designed to impose their expertise on consumers with little incentive to collaborate.
• Providers have to navigate an almost unimaginable diversity of customers; people who, as patients, are often ‘not themselves’.
• Providers are charged to ‘fix’ or ‘manage’ an organic entity with only a man-made repair manual at hand; organic entities who have independent agency, and are also prey to unpredictable outside forces
• The work environment for healthcare workers has:
• _a severe, and legally binding, hierarchy
• _an intense regulatory milieu
• _ essentially implausible time and resource constraints to navigate
• Most providers seek their work as an altruistic vocation, with little material reward, but can find themselves morally distressed or injured.
• Compensation structures are, to be generous, labyrinthine; often incompatible with sanity.!

IAMAZEBRA uses the universal principles and techniques of improv, but IAMAZEBRA understands how much more challenging their application is within the world of healthcare. So IAMAZEBRA uses a well-honed and focused healthcare lens to craft customized improv learning experiences - whether aimed at learning specific skills or stress relief and camaraderie - that assure players are able to make meaning and use of those skills within their own unique healthcare environments and experiences.