Dose of Togetherness with Tara Rynders
We face many myths around grief including how we should grieve and how we should support others through grief. As a registered nurse specialist in resiliency and wellness, dancer, and grief recovery specialist, Tara will speak from the nursing perspective about grief, supporting oneself and others through grief, and how the arts have been an essential component to collectively caring for healthcare providers experiencing grief during COVID-19.
Tara Rynders has been a nurse for over 15 years and works at Rose Medical Center as a Nurse Specialist in Wellness and Resiliency.
She has a Bachelors degree in Nursing, a Bachelors in Spanish, and a Masters in Fine Arts with specialization in dance, movement and somatic practices. She is also a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist.
Tara has combined her expertise in arts, dance, and movement with her nursing practice to create immersive experiences for colleagues in health care that support self-care and raise awareness about the detrimental effects of compassion fatigue, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress.
In 2018 she produced the immersive theatrical experience, First, Do No Harm, in which the audience accompanies performers throughout the halls of Rose Medical Center. This one of kind immersive theatrical performance allowed the audience members to see and experience the weight that patient care and illness has on caregivers and their family members. Her innovative melding of art with nursing and science was recognized through the highest level of nursing recognition in Colorado when she was given the Nightingale Luminary Award last year. She is currently directing, collecting and disseminating research findings from The Clinic workshops, an art and play-based workshop series for healthcare providers, that have proven to decrease burnout and secondary traumatic stress and increase empathy in caregivers.
Tara is passionate about caring for caregivers in order to reduce burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion fatigue. She is currently piloting Resiliency Moments, a virtual interaction between one artist and one healthcare provider at a time that offers space for our providers to feel seen, heard, and cared for, through an artistic experience, curated specifically for individual healthcare providers during COVID-19.
She has a strength in combining the arts with science which has been recognized by numerous grant and scholarship awards. Notably she has been awarded grants to pursue her vision for nursing research and arts-based resiliency workshops through A Blade of Grass Fellowship, and multiple Grants through the Arts in Society, Reimagine Denver 2020, and Colorado Creative Industries.
