Teaching and Speaking Opportunities
Dr. Thomas regularly gives talks and teach workshops to professional and lay organizations on a variety of topics, including anxiety, depression, pain, hypnosis, adherence to medical protocols, parenting, and improving health care outcomes and treatment. Examples in the last year include teaching a workshop "Pediatric Anxiety and Pain: Combining Hypnosis and CBT to Improve Treatment Efficacy"at the American Psychological Association's Annual Conference, a panel entitled "Multidisciplinary Interventions For Pediatric Chronic Pain" at the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Annual Meeting, and teaching beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels at the National Pediatric Hypnosis Training Institute. I also have long collaborated with organizations that support children and families dealing with chronic illness, such as the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. This has often meant giving to talks to parents and professionals on topics such as parenting children with chronic illness, and improving adherence to medical protocols.
Consultation/Supervision with Mental Health Professionals
Supervising and teaching have been a favorite part of Dr. Thomas’ professional experience. She provide supervision and consultation to trainees and faculty at the Stanford School of Medicine, and also to other professionals in the community. Services are available for both in person meetings, and though phone or video.
Consultation to Healthcare Organizations
A theme throughout Dr. Thomas’ professional life has been program development and system change. From her days as grad student to the present, she has loved to take her individual clinical work and expand it to build programs and develop interventions that improve health care systems and patient care. For example, she developed and served as the founding Clinical Director of the Pediatric Pain Rehabilitation Center at Stanford. Her latest project has been with Stanford Children's Health and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital developing intervention focused on procedural pain management and preventing medical trauma. Goals also include increasing patient satisfaction, increasing medical provider job satisfaction, and increasing efficiency and efficacy of care. Dr. Thomas develops interventions, coordinates the necessary interdisciplinary groups, oversees data collection, and provides leadership and training, all while empowering those already in the hospital setting to take over these duties as appropriate in order to create a sustainable system. This video is an example of some of the work on that project.