Modern wellbeing programs for health practitioners require a more holistic approach to the whole person. Hospitals today need to focus on supporting the entire wellbeing of their staff. When the pandemic hit, hospitals had no choice but to face the reality that their frontline staff could no longer continue working in the same ways. Yet, many hospitals enforced mandatory overtime to keep their doors open. This pushed their staff to burnout and some even quit their jobs.
For other frontline staff, they kept pushing through the overtime, which has exacerbated mental health issues. Now facing issues of burnout and trauma in the health care industry, mental health is a top priority that employers and managers need to address. Today, nurses are leaving their jobs and many are refusing to take-on mandatory vaccines regulations and focusing their efforts on finding other work alternatives. A holistic approach to wellbeing is the ideal way to create nursing retention of the future.
What Does a Holistic Approach Look Like for a Modern Nurse Retention Strategy?
To understand a holistic approach, we might use Anne Mulcahy, former chairperson and CEO of Xerox Corporation as an example. She said:
“Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person — not just an employee — are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled.”
To take a holistic approach to a modern nursing retention strategy is to support the health and wellbeing of hospital staff, from a whole-person perspective. Gone are the days of taking a mini workshop on stress management or burnout. Instead, make the overall personal development of your staff an integral part of a nursing retention strategy to support their lives inside and outside of work.
A holistic perspective involves an overall wellness strategy that’s sustainable and facilitates long-term health and wellness gains, such as:
- Mindset and Mindfulness training
- Cognitive wellness, and peak performance training
- Physical wellness
- Spiritual support and wellness
- Community capacity building & wellness coaching
Nurses have always taken a holistic and spiritual-care approach to the care and nursing interventions of their patients. Employers need to equip their nurses with the right culture and climate to prioritize their own personal wellbeing. With or without the pandemic, its lasting impact on global workplaces makes today the ideal time to consider all dimensions of health and wellbeing as a modern retention strategy. This has the benefit to enhance the face of the health care system forever, and profoundly broaden the search for health care talent – and successfully retain them.
How To Create a Holistic Hospital Wellbeing Program
1. Create a culture of mindfulness and wellness amongst frontline and leaders
Once you have HR and leadership buy-in, get your frontline staff onboard too. That means creating a culture that supports self-care, and personal development by training your staff on some of the core principals of everyday mindfulness. You might even promote a meditation group for stress-management. You can launch external initiatives and partnerships that take your staff beyond just physical health improvements, and “hitting the gym” such as promoting peak performance strategies, hospital-wide challenges, or mindfulness sessions to encourage participation.
2. Offer External Resources By Forming Partnerships With Outside Agencies
Instead of brushing off your staff to workplace in-services, that are dominated by the same culture that’s creating employee dissatisfaction, form external partnerships with skilled coaches and healthcare consultants with healthcare backgrounds. Offer your health heroes the autonomy and privacy to seek-out the expert help when required. The Health Benefits that you provide are a great adjunct and can further enhance what outside consultants can do. But accessing these external benefits can be time-consuming to an already “schedule-burdened” health practitioner.
3. Offer Resources That Go Beyond Physical Wellbeing
It’s not enough to build a culture of self-care and holistic wellness. Often times, these fall under the same outdated advice that cause more harm than good to the body. Go beyond that, and offer resources and initiatives for every dimension of wellbeing. Your hospital can focus its efforts on providing a more integrated approach to health and wellbeing that supports the entire person’s personal and professional development. These partnerships make for higher quality health care across all areas of your organization. By being obsessed with your staffs wellbeing and personal development, that feeling will be conveyed to your staff, which empowers them to be more balanced and mindful. All too often, this work falls under the umbrella of Occupational Health, but in fact those departments are often overburdened by their own exhaustion – which we’ve seen as a result of COVID-19.
4. Allow Your Staff To Prioritize Their Own Personal Development Goals
One’s personal development goals span far and wide – with everyone going at their own pace. That’s why a Satori created a 7-week program that’s fit for defining ones health and wellness goals that’s tailored to meet the person where they’re at on their journey to personal change.
Satori’s program, The ProMind Experience, empowers nurses to discover top mindset strategies and craft a self-development plan that consolidates their strengths and goals, while creating more balance and freedom in their lives. Our virtual program creates happier and healthier nurses with sustainable tools they’ll use over their lifetime…in 7 weeks or less, using feedback from their community.
To implement this employee wellness and personal development program in your hospital, you’re arming your employees with the right mindset strategies and personal development solutions to support all facets of their life. Schedule a demo to find out how you can facilitate the development of personal wellbeing and sustainable healthy habits as a part of your hospital’s nursing retention strategy of the future.
Why Nursing Retention Is Important
When you find that right nurse, you want to keep them! It costs hospitals a lot of money to hire the best health practitioners. In fact, According to the 2019 National Healthcare Retention & RN Staffing Report, it costs between $40,300 and $64,000 to replace one clinical nurse, with the average hospital losing $4.4 million to $6.9 million each year. For the healthcare industry to thrive in today’s economy, more and more organizations are turning to qualified healthcare consultants to help them effectively adapt to changing industry norms and retain top staff.
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