Introduction
We’re here to help you launch your Schwartz Rounds program, renew your partnership with us, or expand the program within your organization.
Our full pitch deck requires approximately one hour. Since many leadership conversations will be shorter, you should select the slides that best fit your audience, local context, decision needed, and time available. The guide explains how to use the deck as a modular resource, tailor the case for different stakeholders, adapt language and evidence for global and adjacent markets, and prepare a focused 15-minute presentation.
The slide notes are to help you understand the purpose of each slide and identify the points that matter most, not serve as a script. The most effective presentations sound natural, reflect your knowledge of your own organization, and lead toward a specific next step.
Note: The slide deck and this document were curated specifically to support you. Please share feedback with us about how we can make either resource easier to use or more impactful by emailing community@theschwartzcenter.org.
How to Use the Slide Deck
The Schwartz Rounds program is a well-established, evidence-based approach to supporting staff, strengthening connection, and contributing to cultures of compassionate care. The challenge is translating that value into terms that resonate with leaders balancing competing strategic priorities and financial pressures.
The pitch deck helps presenters connect the Schwartz Rounds program to issues that leaders already care about, including staff well-being, teamwork, patient experience, safety culture, engagement, retention, and organizational performance. It is designed for both program adoption and renewal conversations.
The goal isn’t just to explain what the Schwartz Rounds program is, but to help decision-makers see it as a strategic investment in people, teams, patient care, and organizational culture.
Presenters should select slides based on the purpose of the conversation, what the audience already knows, what matters most locally, and the action you want the audience to take.
Clarify the goal: What decision or action are you seeking?
- Executive sponsorship or budget approval
- Interest with a clinical, workforce, education, or operational leader
- Renewed support for an existing Schwartz Rounds program
- Buy-in from potential champions or a planning group
- Readiness for a broader implementation conversation with the Schwartz Center
Tailor to your audience: Before selecting slides, clarify:
- What pressures or priorities are most important to this audience?
- What does the audience already know about the Schwartz Rounds program?
- Which evidence, story, or local example will be most persuasive?
- How much time is truly available, including questions?
- What local data, strategic language, or outcomes should be incorporated?
Prepare your presentation: A focused presentation should answer four core questions:
- What organizational problems can the Schwartz Rounds program help solve?
- How does the Schwartz Rounds program meaningfully address those problems?
- What return will we receive for our investment in the program?
- What do we need to realistically implement or sustain the program?
Prepare for Pricing Questions Before Presenting
The pitch deck does not display current program fees. Before presenting to an audience likely to ask about cost, contact us at community@theschwartzcenter.org to obtain current pricing and understand what is included.
Using Burnout, Moral Distress, and Moral Injury Terminology
The pitch deck uses several terms to describe workforce strain that aren’t interchangeable and can vary in meaning across professions, countries, and local cultures. Presenters may adapt the terminology to align with local context, while preserving the core message: workforce strain isn’t an individual failure and requires meaningful organizational response.
- Burnout: a work-related pattern that may include emotional exhaustion, depersonalization or cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy. It is often shaped by workload, control, resources, culture, and other system conditions.
- Moral distress: occurs when a person recognizes what they believe is the ethically appropriate action but feels constrained from taking it. It may also describe distress associated with difficult value conflicts or repeated exposure to ethically challenging situations.
- Moral injury: often used to describe deeper psychological, emotional, or spiritual harm that can follow actions, inactions, or circumstances that violate a person’s moral beliefs or expectations. The term carries important clinical, ethical, and cultural implications and may not be appropriate in every setting.
- Disconnection and isolation: describe relational consequences that can accompany strain, including feeling separated from colleagues, purpose, patients, or the meaning of the work.
Schwartz Rounds sessions are not clinical treatment and should not be presented as “curing” burnout or moral injury. The program creates organizational space for reflection, storytelling, connection, and shared understanding.
Presenter Preparation Checklist
Contact the Schwartz Center for current pricing before any budget-focused conversation.
- Clarify the decision or next step you want from the audience.
- Hide slides that will not be used.
- Preserve the original slide order and slide numbers so you can reference the slide-by-slide guidance.
- Customize slides (such as slide 9) as needed before presenting.
- Insert credible local data or replace U.S. data if needed.
- Choose the most locally relevant testimonial rather than presenting all testimonial slides.
- Confirm terminology, spelling, roles, and examples for the country, region, and organizational setting.
- Prepare concise responses to likely questions about confidentiality, participation, implementation workload, evidence, and cost.
- End with a specific next step, owner, and follow-up date.
Using the Pitch Deck in a 15-Minute Presentation
Presenters are not expected to use every slide, and most presentations will be stronger when they do not. A shorter, coherent case is more persuasive than a dense presentation that attempts to cover the full deck.
Recommended Core Pathway
- Opening and local framing: 1-2 minutes
- Slide 2: Title and purpose
- Slides 3-5 (optional): Introduce the Schwartz Center
- Problem and urgency: 2-3 minutes
- Slide 7: Workforce instability and urgency
- Slide 9: Local strategic priorities
- Program definition: 2 minutes
- Slide 13: What the Schwartz Rounds program is
- Evidence and impact: 3-4 minutes
- Slide 16: Psychological distress evidence
- Slide 17: Impact across individuals, teams, patient care, and organizations
- Business case and testimonial: 3 minutes
- Slide 27 or 28: Business case or broader ROI
- One or two locally relevant testimonials from Slides 30-37
- Implementation, investment, and next step: 2-3 minutes
- Slide 41: Typical 4-6 month launch pathway
- Slide 42: What the investment includes
- Slide 43: Action-oriented close
- Renewal audience: Prioritize local evaluation data, Slide 17, Slide 21, Slide 39, Slide 40 or 41 if succession or relaunch is relevant, Slide 42, and Slide 43 with a specific renewal request.
Tailoring for Your Audience’s Concerns
A successful pitch translates a consistent value proposition into language that reflects the responsibilities and pressures of your audience.
Concern: Workforce turnover and risk, cost and performance, credible evidence of impact, and manageable implementation support.
Position the Schwartz Rounds program as a strategic intervention that supports workforce stability, culture, patient experience, and organizational performance. Lead with the problem, measurable impact, business case, implementation feasibility, and next step. Avoid beginning with extensive operational detail.
Helpful framing
- “Burnout and turnover are financial, operational, cultural, and safety risks.”
- “This is an investment in the people and relationships on which performance depends.”
Slides to consider including:
- Prioritize slides 7, 17, 27, 30 or 31, 41, 42, and 43.
- Use slide 10 or 11 only if additional workforce or safety framing is needed.
Concern: Burnout and moral distress, cross-role communication, compassionate patient care, and the emotional and moral dimensions of clinical work
Connect the program to the emotional and moral realities of care, professional fulfillment, teamwork, patient safety, compassionate care, and quality. Clinical leaders often respond to both research findings and recognizable examples of staff experience.
Helpful framing
- “This supports the kind of care we want our teams to provide.”
- “Schwartz Rounds sessions create space for staff to process what they carry from the work.”
Slides to consider including:
- Add slides 11, 14, or 15
- Consider replacing slide 27 with slide 20 or pairing slide 16 with a clinically resonant testimonial such as slide 32, 33, or 35.
Concern: Staff connection and belonging, retention and engagement, cross-departmental culture-building, and a tangible signal of support for staff.
Present the Schwartz Rounds program as a visible, meaningful investment in employee experience and culture. Avoid describing it as another wellness benefit. Emphasize connection, belonging, engagement, retention, recruitment, and leadership support.
Helpful framing
- “This is something staff experience directly, not simply a message about well-being.”
- “Schwartz Rounds sessions help people remain connected to their work and to one another.”
Slides to consider including:
- Prioritize slides 7, 9, 17 or 18, 21, 27 or 28, and a culture- or workforce-oriented testimonial such as slide 30, 31, or 33.
Concern: Specific team or department needs, cross-role connection, the role of local champions, and practical steps for building support.
Focus on local relevance and coalition-building. These conversations may be less about immediate approval and more about identifying need, developing champions, and preparing for executive sponsorship.
Helpful framing
- “Where is the need for this kind of reflective space most visible?”
- “Who else should be part of the next conversation?”
Adapting for Global and Adjacent Markets
Global Adaptation
The Schwartz Rounds program is used by organizations around the world, and presenting it well in a new country means rethinking the language, evidence, and examples.
- Replace or supplement U.S. workforce and financial data with credible local sources.
- Use locally appropriate spelling, professional titles, and health system terminology.
- Select testimonials from your same country, region, or organizational context when possible.
- Preserve the core evidence-based message while making the language feel credible and natural locally.
Adjacent and Non-Healthcare Settings
As the Schwartz Center expands into veterinary medicine, higher education, social services, and other relational settings, presenters should adapt healthcare-specific language and evidence.
- “Patients” → clients, students, families, service users, etc.
- “Healthcare workers/providers” → staff, faculty, trainees, or role-specific terms
- “Patient care” → service delivery, learning environment, client care, etc.
- Reconsider slides that depend on hospital-specific turnover, patient safety, malpractice, or utilization data unless equivalent local evidence is available.
- Emphasize what remains universal: emotionally complex work, moral tension, human suffering, relational responsibility, cumulative stress, connection, reflection, and compassion.
- Consider prioritizing slides 13, 14, 17, and a locally relevant testimonial such as slide 36.
Slide-by-Slide Speaker Guidance
The following guidance corresponds to the 48-slide July 2026 pitch deck. Select slides have been intentionally omitted.
Slide 3: About the Schwartz Center
- Include this slide for audiences unfamiliar with the Schwartz Center’s mission, credibility, and global reach; summarize quickly or hide it for knowledgeable audiences.
Slide 4: Our Work
- Explain that the Schwartz Center is more than a training vendor and supports education, community, recognition, and organizational culture.
- Emphasize the aspect of the Schwartz Center’s work that is most relevant for your organization, such as learning, community, recognition, or culture.
Slide 5: Kenneth B. Schwartz: The Human Origin of the Work
- Explain that Ken Schwartz, the organization’s founder, wrote that small acts of kindness made “the unbearable bearable” shortly before his death from cancer.
- Connect the origin story to the enduring importance of human connection during serious illness and difficult work.
Slide 7: Workforce Instability Is Eroding Health System Performance
- Frame burnout, turnover, vacancies, distress, and disconnection as financial, operational, cultural, and safety risks.
- Highlight two or three data points that fit the audience rather than reading every statistic.
- Use the terminology primer in this guide on the terms burnout, moral distress, and moral injury.
- Add your organization or country’s data whenever credible information is available.
- Hospital-specific data may not translate in every setting; use evidence that reflects the challenges in your local setting.
Slide 8: Compassion Makes Healthcare Better
- Use this slide to position compassion as an evidence-informed clinical and organizational asset.
- Choose a few outcomes to highlight rather than reading the full list.
- For clinical audiences, emphasize patient outcomes, adherence, experience, and quality.
- For workforce audiences, emphasize connection, fulfillment, affiliation, and professional quality of life.
- Reinforce that compassion is part of high-quality performance, not separate from it.
Slide 9: Connect the Schwartz Rounds Program to Local Strategic Priorities
- This slide must be customized before presentation. Do not present the placeholder language.
- Identify two or three priorities using the organization’s own language from strategic plans, surveys, quality goals, or leadership communications.
- Choose priorities the Schwartz Rounds program can credibly support, such as retention, staff well-being, patient experience, teamwork, belonging, or compassionate care.
- For non-healthcare settings, use priorities such as learner well-being, faculty connection, client experience, professional retention, or cross-team collaboration.
Slide 10: The Connections Between Compassion, Distress, Moral Injury, and Burnout
- Use this slide to position organizational support as part of the response to workforce strain.
- Explain that lower perceived support is associated with greater burnout and that burnout can diminish the capacity for compassion.
- Emphasize that responsibility should not be placed solely on individual workers.
Slide 11: Linkages Between Compassion, Burnout, and Patient Safety
- Use this slide to connect workforce experience with quality, safety, continuity, and patient experience.
- Focus on the one or two outcomes most relevant to the audience, and connect the slide to local safety, quality, risk, or patient experience priorities when possible.
- For non-healthcare settings, replace patient-safety and malpractice framing with equivalent outcomes such as service quality, learner experience, client trust, team reliability, or professional retention.
Slide 13: What Is the Schwartz Rounds Program?
- When other support programs already exist, explain the reflective, story-based, multidisciplinary features that make the Schwartz Rounds experience distinct.
- For non-healthcare settings, replace “healthcare workers” and “work of healthcare” with locally appropriate language while retaining the core structure and purpose.
Slide 14: What This Looks Like in Practice: Sample Topics
- Explain that topics may include challenges, uncertainty, grief, joy, hope, and connection.
- Reinforce that the purpose is reflection and meaning-making, not solving the case.
- For non-healthcare settings, use examples appropriate to veterinary teams, learners, faculty, social services, or other settings.
Slide 15: Schwartz Rounds Sessions Help Staff Provide More Compassionate Patient Care
- Highlight one or two percentages and explain the overall pattern rather than reading every result.
- Emphasize the dose-response finding: greater attendance was associated with greater reported impact.
- Pair the research with local attendance trends or evaluation data.
- For non-healthcare settings, adapt outcome language carefully. Do not assume patient-care measures transfer directly to education, veterinary care, social services, or other sectors.
Slide 16: Schwartz Rounds Sessions Significantly Reduce Psychological Distress
- Emphasize the measurable reduction in self-reported psychological distress.
- For non-healthcare settings, the evidence comes from healthcare settings, but can be presented as relevant supporting evidence, not proof that identical effects will occur in every adjacent setting.
Slide 17: The Impact of the Schwartz Rounds Program
- Emphasize that the impact begins with individual experience but can extend through relationships, team functioning, care, and culture.
- Use Slides 18-21 only when deeper discussion of a specific level is useful.
- For non-healthcare settings, adapt “care team” and “patient care” to the relationships and outcomes that matter in your local setting.
Slide 18: The Impact of the Schwartz Rounds Program: Individual Attendees
- For non-healthcare settings, individual outcomes such as connection, reduced isolation, and renewed purpose may translate well, but terminology should reflect the local workforce or learner population.
Slide 19: The Impact of the Schwartz Rounds Program: Care Team
- Connect the slide to local concerns about silos, interprofessional relationships, trust, or collaboration.
- Clarify that the program complements rather than replaces formal teamwork, quality, or safety interventions.
- For non-healthcare settings, use locally relevant language for teams, cohorts, departments, faculties, practices, or service groups.
Slide 20: The Impact of the Schwartz Rounds Program: Patient Care
- Connect the slide to local patient experience goals or feedback.
- Use locally preferred terms for patients, families, clients, or service users.
- For non-healthcare settings, replace patient-care outcomes with the recipient experience most relevant to the setting, such as client care, learner support, member experience, or relationships with animal patients and families.
Slide 21: The Impact of the Schwartz Rounds Program: Organizations
- Frame culture change as cumulative and dependent on consistent implementation and leadership support.
- Connect the slide to local culture survey findings, strategic priorities, or examples of cross-department collaboration.
- Emphasize visible leadership support and participation across roles and departments.
- Use this slide for executive, workforce, culture, or renewal audiences.
- For non-healthcare settings, translate organizational outcomes to the setting, such as faculty culture, practice climate, cross-program connection, or service collaboration.
Slide 22: What Participants Experience in Schwartz Rounds Sessions
- Highlight two or three themes rather than explaining the full graphic.
- Clarify that confidentiality, intentional structure, and facilitation support reflection and vulnerability.
- Distinguish the experience from operational meetings and problem-solving sessions.
- For non-healthcare settings, the experiential themes are broadly transferable. Select language that feels natural and credible in the local culture and profession.
Slide 23: Global Impact
- Use the figures to demonstrate scale, not as the central reason for adoption.
Slide 24: Organizations We Support
- Use this slide to demonstrate the breadth of settings in which the Schwartz Rounds program can be relevant, from traditional healthcare organizations to education, veterinary care, insurers, social services, and other adjacent settings.
- Point to one or two organization types that resemble the audience rather than describing every example.
Slide 26: How Will the Schwartz Rounds Program Benefit Our Organization?
- Use two to four concise benefits tied directly to local priorities, needs, and language, drawn from your strategic plan, surveys, retention goals, patient or client experience priorities, and local stories.
- For renewals, show what the program has contributed and what continued support could enable.
- For non-healthcare settings, use outcomes and terminology that reflect the local sector rather than carrying over healthcare-specific claims.
Slide 27: The Business Case: Reduced Costs and Stronger Performance
- Use this slide to connect workforce and culture outcomes with cost avoidance, protected capacity, retention, productivity, patient loyalty, and risk.
- Choose the financial and operational pathways most relevant to the audience rather than reading the full slide.
- Frame value through cost avoidance, workforce stability, protected productivity, experience, and risk reduction.
- Use local replacement costs, vacancy costs, overtime, agency staffing, engagement, or experience data when available.
- Replace the figures and payment assumptions outside the United States if local data is available.
- For non-healthcare settings, hospital finance, malpractice, and utilization assumptions may not translate. Build the case around locally relevant costs, capacity, retention, quality, and reputation.
Slide 28: The Case for Compassion: A Strong Return on Investment
- Use this slide as an alternative to slide 27 or as an additional way to show value across multiple organizational domains.
- Use slide 27 for more finance-oriented audiences and slide 28 for audiences that prefer a broader value framework.
- For non-healthcare settings, replace hospital-specific outcomes with the costs, benefits, and performance domains that matter in the local sector.
Slide 29: The Schwartz Rounds Program: An Investment in Our Future
- Use this slide to summarize value across the organization, patients, and providers.
- Emphasize the stakeholder group most relevant to the audience.
- Use the slide after slide 27 or 28 when a concise summary is helpful before a testimonial.
For non-healthcare settings, adapt “patients” and “providers” to the people who receive and deliver services, education, or care in the setting.
Slides 30-37: Success Stories
- Select examples that are most relevant for your audience, workforce, and organization.
- Slide 33 is a strong example for retail health, ambulatory care, enterprise clinical teams, and other settings outside traditional hospitals.
- Slide 34 can help audiences see how the model applies where professionals support members, clients, or populations rather than delivering bedside care.
- Slide 35 supports use in academic and teaching environments and may help bridge healthcare and higher education audiences.
- Slide 36 is the strongest testimonial for higher education, trainees, faculty, curriculum leaders, and learner-support contexts.
- Slide 37 is useful for social services, community-based work, correctional settings, and organizations spanning distinct professional groups.
Slide 39: Sustaining Quality and Expanding Impact Through Continuous Support
- Emphasize the support elements most relevant to the audience, including observations, debriefs, workshops, Community of Practice sessions, webinars, succession planning, and Program Advisor consultation.
- For new adoption, emphasize implementation support and community; for renewal, emphasize quality, succession, sustainability, and continued learning.
Slide 40: Your Schwartz Rounds Team
- Use this slide to clarify the local roles and shared infrastructure needed to implement and sustain the program.
- Clarify explicitly that the planning committee has approximately 8-12 members total, including the five leadership team members, not 8-12 additional people.
- Use the companion Roles and Responsibilities document for additional detail.
- Identify potential local role holders and consider representation across disciplines, departments, shifts, locations, and clinical and nonclinical roles.
- For non-healthcare settings, adapt role titles and representation to the structure of the local organization while preserving facilitation, leadership, coordination, and broad stakeholder participation.
Slide 41: Typical Launch Pathways: The First 4-6 Months
- Present four to six months as a typical pathway, not a guarantee – some organizations start sooner and others may elect for a longer start-up journey based on local context.
- Acknowledge local contracting, scheduling, workforce, calendar, or approval constraints.
- For renewal, adapt the discussion to relaunch, succession, or quality improvement.
Slide 42: Minimal Investment, Maximum Impact
- Contact the Schwartz Center before a budget-focused conversation.
- Use the slide to discuss value, then offer an accurate organization-specific pricing follow-up.
- For systems or multiple programs, ask the Schwartz Center about the appropriate structure before presenting.
- For non-healthcare settings, program structures and available support may differ by region or sector. Confirm the applicable offer before describing inclusions.
Slide 43: Invest in Compassion Today
- State the specific decision or next step you want. Possible next steps include identifying an executive sponsor, authorizing a consultation, confirming budget, selecting champions, attending an information session, or scheduling a follow-up.
- Consider saying: “The opportunity is to support individuals in a way that strengthens teams, care, and culture. I am asking that we take the next step by…”
- Customize the closing request for adoption, renewal, expansion, or relaunch.
- For non-healthcare settings, adapt “patient care” and related language to the people, relationships, and outcomes served by the local
Slide 44: Thank You / Questions
- The Schwartz Center team is here to support you. Let the audience know directly that the Schwartz Center team is available to answer questions or meet with interested leaders.
- Replace the placeholder with the presenter’s name, role, email, and appropriate Schwartz Center contact or process.
- Treat questions as an opportunity to understand concerns and decision criteria.
- Do not end without confirming the next step, owner, and expected timing.