Debriefing the Front Lines: From Tragedy, Triumph Emerges
“Of all the things I am, being human is the most challenging,” said Tara Kosmas, Founding Executive Director of Debriefing the Front Lines.
Life as a 23% pediatric burn survivor shaped Tara’s experience and led her to the nursing profession. At the age of 20, Tara began her nursing career at West Penn Burn Unit in Pittsburgh, PA. Despite her lived experience as a burn survivor, she felt grossly underprepared for what she would witness.
“These years were hard and humbling – and a bit blurry as trauma tends to be,” Tara Kosmas
It was in the burn unit, standing in the treatment room, debriding wounds, and seeing people who looked like me, I felt the power of the human spirit. The burn unit left me with a powerful message that in taking care of the dying, I would learn to live,” Tara recalls.
Tara, 23% burn survivor with her parents at Children’s Hospital National Medical Center
“In 2016, after 16 years of navigating what I now know is Cumulative Care Taking Trauma®, I had the courage to admit that alone was no longer enough.”
Tara dedicated years to searching for what this would mean. Her relentless pursuit of answers led Tara 1,800 miles from home to Santa Fe, NM. Here Tara received treatment for C-PTSD at an inpatient holistic treatment center where she lived for 5 weeks. It was during this time, Tara began to dive deeper into the world of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Polyvagal Theory, and self-compassion.
“This treatment, education, and integration changed how I lived, loved, worked and moved through the world,” – Tara Kosmas
This experience reiterated the importance of commUNITY as an integral part of healing personal and cumulative caretaking trauma. For this reason, Tara became certified in debriefing peer support and became a board-certified nurse coach (NC-BC).
Years prior, Tara had obtained an MSN in education, and post-treatment her passion for education only intensified. In the years to come, Tara built a simulation curriculum in two 2 baccalaureate nursing programs at Florida Gulf Coast University and Towson University.
Tara wanted to prepare nurses for the emotional realities of the profession and was able to do this through the use of high-fidelity simulation and simulated participants. Tara utilized simulated participants to discuss unique topics such as end-of-life care, substance use, and the effects of transgender bullying for which she won an innovation in teaching award. Little did she know her experience in building psychologically safe spaces would lead her to found the nationally recognized mental health organization, Debriefing the Front Lines.
Innovation in Teaching Award for the use of simulated participants in mental health education, Towson University 2019
“I was working as an Assistant Professor at Towson University in March of 2020. I began receiving an alarming number of calls from former students and colleagues fearful for themselves, their families, their patients, and the commUNITY at large. Just 16 days after a global pandemic was declared, I facilitated our first debriefing session. One by one, I began Debriefing the Front Lines”, Kosmas shared.
To date, Debriefing the Front Lines has facilitated over 4,000 debriefing sessions.
They’ve responded to crisis events by offering complimentary sessions to nurses. Examples include the mass layoffs at Texas Children’s Hospital, Hurricanes Ian, Helene, Milton, and the LA fires.
Most recently, Debriefing the Front Lines collaborated with fellow non-profit, Rekindled Nurse for an outreach project following Hurricane Helene and Milton in Southwest, Florida, Tara’s hometown.
Through this community and donor-funded project, together they delivered over 400 individual gift bags of gratitude and provided peer support to nurses in the aftermath of disaster.
Debriefing the Front Lines is a team of board-certified nurse coaches (NC-BC) Tara Kosmas, Kacie Salas, and Michelle Oakley and Operations Director, Nicholas Kosmas.
Together the team provides:
>>Meet the team here.
Debriefing Facilitators Michelle, Kacie, Tara, and Operations Director, Nik.
“Our clients work in the ER, ICU, L&D, PACU, remote roles and everywhere in between. They are nurse managers and leaders – they are humans in need of nurse-led mental health care. It is the honor of our lifetime to serve my colleagues in such a meaningful way. As a burn survivor, my respect for the profession began long before I became a nurse myself,” Kosmas said.
Debriefing the Front Lines has partnered with public health departments, ICU units, hospitals and state-based innovation programs to provide debriefing as a resource to nurses.
When asked what’s next for Debriefing the Front Lines, Tara confidently shared.
“It is our intention to provide language as a blueprint for identifying interventions, developing advancements, and supporting ongoing research that establishes debriefing as a national standard of nursing practice. Debriefing the Front Lines focuses on terms that recognize our humanness and provides tools that put this recognition into action.”
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