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Creating a Healthier Life - A step-by-step guide to wellness

Journal Article: Daily healthy habits to reduce stress and increase longevity

The Challenge: Health care is in no short supply of emotionally taxing and traumatic incidents that drain an employee’s resilience. When frontline staff are exposed to traumatic events, they often feel too busy with patient care activities to take time to debrief and recover. Instead, they opt into the “I’m fine” culture, either forgoing emotional support or relying on personal coping mechanisms that might not be healthy or sufficient.

The Organization: Main Line Health is a five-hospital health system headquartered in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, serving portions of Philadelphia and its western suburbs.

The Approach: Psychological first aid is a type of emotional support often used by disaster relief organizations. Implementing the same approach, Main Line created a psychological first aid team to help support staff in the immediate hours following trauma. The goals are to reduce initial distress caused by trauma, enhance coping strategies, and actively connect individuals with ongoing support services.

The Result: The psychological first aid team increased availability of immediate emotional support services and increased employee assistance program (EAP) utilization by staff and first responders. It also increased manager awareness of their staffs’ emotional states and helped them feel more equipped to support their staff during times of distress.

The Ohio State University College of Nursing and the Office of the University Chief Wellness Officer released a new report that reveals the level of burnout among working parents during the COVID-19 pandemic and the adverse consequences of that burnout for both themselves and their children.

Patient-centered, high-quality health care relies on the well-being, health, and safety of health care clinicians. However, alarmingly high rates of clinician burnout in the United States are detrimental to the quality of care being provided, harmful to individuals in the workforce, and costly. It is important to take a systemic approach to address burnout that focuses on the structure, organization, and culture of health care.

Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being builds upon two groundbreaking reports from the past twenty years, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century, which both called attention to the issues around patient safety and quality of care. This report explores the extent, consequences, and contributing factors of clinician burnout and provides a framework for a systems approach to clinician burnout and professional well-being, a research agenda to advance clinician well-being, and recommendations for the field.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has shifted clinical social work (CSW) and mental health education in Australia, and indeed throughout much of the globe, onto online delivery. The disruption caused by COVID-19 presents unexpected challenges in fostering the development of skill sets among social work educators in partnership with students. This article is a reflexive collaborative autoethnography written by four educators of different international and cultural backgrounds at a regional university in Queensland. Our university has experienced a shift from primarily a face-to-face delivery to online delivery due to social distancing. This article is grounded in an ethic of love, a values-based relationship-oriented practice promoting care, collaborative dialogue and solidarity between people, using self-compassion and reflexivity. We explore how COVID-19 has forced the authors to alter their teaching practice, cope with uncertainties, and respond with loving kindness to the shifting needs of students. We draw upon our experiences as educators of diverse cultural, linguistic, gender, and sexualities from Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Nigeria and reflect upon how we have simultaneously turned inward and outward through technology. We draw upon person-centered, narrative, trauma informed and anti-oppressive clinical and educational approaches when exploring self-compassion and loving approaches with the students. We discuss the need for self-compassion and love of others as we respond to the current crisis by modeling self-compassion and love for CSW students who are experiencing crises, including loss of employment, separation from family overseas and interstate, isolation from colleagues and loved ones, and healthcare issues.

A nation cannot fully thrive until everyone—no matter who they are, where they live, or how much money they make—can live their healthiest possible life, and helping people live their healthiest life is and has always been the essential role of nurses. Ultimately, the health and well-being of nurses influence the quality, safety, and cost of the care they provide, as well as organizations and systems of care.

This slide deck explores the factors that impact well-being for nurses, why it’s critical we address nurse well-being urgently, and the integrated interventions employers of nurses, nursing education programs, nursing leaders, licensing boards, and nursing organizations, can implement to support nurses fully.

Use the talking points and key messages in this resource to facilitate discussions among your networks that can catalyze change in the systems, structures, and policies that affect the health and well-being of nurses.

Background: High rates of mental health conditions and poor healthy lifestyle behaviors are reported in nurses, other clinicians, and health science students but have not been compared across different professions.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was threefold: (1) describe rates of mental health problems and healthy lifestyle behaviors across the Big 10 health professional faculty and students, (2) compare the health and healthy lifestyle behaviors of the Big 10 health sciences faculty and students across health sciences’ professions, and (3) identify factors predictive of depression, stress, and anxiety.

Methods: Faculty and students from eight health science colleges at the Big 10 Universities responded to the study survey, which included: demographics, healthy lifestyle behavior questions, and three valid/reliable mental health scales. Descriptive statistics described the findings and multiple linear regression identified factors associated with mental health conditions.

Results: Eight-hundred and sixty-nine faculty and 1087 students responded. Approximately 50% of faculty and students reported 7 h of sleep/night, a third achieved 150 min of physical activity/week; 5.5%–9.9% screened positive for depression; and 11.5%–25.5% had anxiety. Age, sleep, and physical activity were associated with lower depression and anxiety.