Partnering with Satori Health & Wellness Coaching, hospitals are engaging their frontline staff at being healthy and well, and improving the lives of their staff everyday. Workplace health promotion programs hold tremendous value in improving staff retention – making YOUR hospital the best hospital to work for. They help employees be healthier. When you have healthy employees, they have greater performance. This is what makes workplace health promotion a staple in many organizations. In addition to enhanced performance, workplace health programs help keep their employees happy and productive. Many workplaces have health & wellness committees, created by the employees themselves.
Why People Burnout
Since COVID-19 there’s been a significant shift in not just how nurses work or when they work, but how much they work. Many nurses ended up working longer hours, with less downtime in between. This additional work has left health practitioners at a higher risk of burnout and stress Self-regulation becomes more difficult during times of stress. Burnout is a physiological condition that occurs when the body’s pushed to its limits.
Top 3 reasons for burning-out:
1. Too big of a workload.
2. Their family and personal lives are challenged due to job
3. The employment doesn’t allow them enough time outside of work to recover (see episode 38 on what to do on your day off work).
Armed with such information, healthy workplaces could reduce these risk factors to fosters healthy employees. Wellbeing programs are a workplace staple, offering a way for employers to encourage healthy lifestyle choices and invest in their employees’ physical and mental wellbeing, preventing the cycle of burnout from occurring.
Corporate Responsibility
When employers support employees at preventing chronic disease they are creating an asset in the company. According to the World Health Organization:“The workplace, along with the school, hospital, city, island, and marketplace, has been established as one of the priority settings for health promotion into the 21st century.” According to the CDC, “an investment in employee health may lower health care costs and insurance claims. In fact, employees with more risk factors, including being overweight, smoking and having diabetes, cost more to insure. And that additional cost will be handed-off to the employers, as opposed to people with fewer risk factors.1, 2“
Workplaces have tremendous influence over keeping their employees healthy. This makes the workplace an ideal setting and infrastructure to support the promotion of health of a large audience; even in areas not affected by work. The thing is, losing an employee can cost an organization at least 50% of their employees wage, depending upon their position in the organization. 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. Organizations and hospitals that partner with Satori for their corporate wellness strategy engage their employees, and retain their top nurses.
Engaging Employees In Health Promotion Program At Work
Employee health promotion programs help the employer in many ways. Creating a health and wellness committee that’s led by employees also supports the organization at large. The first place to start is is to assess if you have the support from your organization. If not, then you know there’s a lack in consciousness in the value of workplace health promotion program itself. This will help you decide where to start with employee wellness initiatives.
Before you jump into developing a program, please look at the culture of your organization. How much time and resources will the employer allow you to dedicate to developing something? While there are many components to creating a thriving workplace health & wellness initiative, one key resource to help you get started is the CDC Workplace Health Promotion resource page. This is a great tool if you don’t have the budget to hire an external healthcare consultant. Most importantly, you should have a general health & wellness perspective when it comes to workplace health promotion programs to not waste funds or personal time.
Healthy behaviour change in the workplace requires strategic assessments, workplace health redesign and a sustainable health strategy. If you want to develop a Health Promotion Program at work, and help your employees build healthy habits , know it takes more than a little dedication, it takes a supportive environment.
Building The Best Hospitals
Sadly, hospitals and their leadership teams are facing their own stressors. The healthcare industry is undergoing rapid transitions and to keep up with modern times, they need to think outside the box on employee engagement and retention. The business of healthcare is an economy based on efficiency, quality, outcomes, and consumer access. To avert risks, a solid nurse retention strategy is required. One such way to retain their healthcare staff is to support their overall health and wellbeing.
According to a U.S. Department of Health & Human Services report in (2002):
Worksites with physical activity programs alone, employers have:
>> Reduced healthcare costs by 20 to 55 percent
>> Reduced short-term sick leave by six to 32 percent
>> Increased productivity by two to 52 percent”
By improving workplace health programs in hospitals, employees can rebound from the challenging physical responses of stress leading them to burnout. When Satori launched ProMind three years ago, our vision was simple: Get health practitioners to think about their physical and mental health more proactively. In early 2020, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Satori launched The ProMind Experience to support hospitals in raising awareness of the benefits of workplace wellness and personal development. The ProMind Experience broadened its focus to encompass physical, cognitive, spiritual and behavioural health to help hospital employers understand and support the full range of wellbeing needs of their employees. The term “Wellbeing” is quite expansive. At Satori we feel the most important element of being well is to be able to self-regulate, and balance your health across all areas in your life.
Building The Best People
In Episode 57, on the 5 reasons to support post-pandemic personal growth, you’ll see why supporting whole person wellness initiatives can retain nurse staffing in hospitals on a much higher level. In my article on 3 Ways Employee Wellness Programs Can Boost Employee Engagement I discussed how high quality programs can reduce stress and reduce cost to health institutions. High Quality Programs also improve relationships and increase morale. Satori’s “gamified” 6-module, mission-focused, program gets health professionals off the stressed-out treadmill, in 7 weeks or less, to live healthy and balanced lives. We support staff in their definition of “wellbeing”
- Yen L, Schultz A, Schnueringer E, Edington DW. Financial costs due to excess health risks among active employees of a utility company. J Occup Environ Med. 2006;48(9): 896-905.
2. Goetzel, RZ, Anderson DR, Whitmer RW, Ozminkowski RJ, Dunn RL, and Wasserman J. The relationship between modifiable health risks and health care expenditures: an analysis of the multi-employer HERO health risk and cost database. J Occup Environ Med. 1998;40(10): 843-854.
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