Wellness over illness…from fad to fundamental…by Tara Roberts, PT, QCP, CDP, RAC-CT
July 13, 2022 | General
Wellness. A term so often used to grab the attention of those who are dissatisfied with their health and often linked to quick fix schemes and shortcuts to “promised better health”. These concepts dominated social media pre-pandemic. A Google search of the hashtag “wellness” for just Instagram alone results in over 58.1 million hits. The term “wellness” can be found in catchy phrases like “5 components of wellness”, the “four pillars of wellness”, and how about the “eight dimensions of wellness”. Whether its 5, 4 or 8, the pandemic has now solidified and legitimized wellness as a top-ranking consideration for workforce stability and sustainability.
Nexion Health, at the urging of Meera Riner, COO, is making employee wellness a fundamental of our employee engagement and overall job satisfaction. With the support of our CEO, Fran Kirley and in coordination with our Vice President of Human Resources, Martha Royal and Vice President of Quality, Tara Roberts, the project took flight. Nexion is approaching this need for re-prioritization of wellness in similar fashion to how we address all process or program improvements. After organizing a committee of interdisciplinary team members including communications, human resources, benefit manager, rehab professionals and nurses, we identified what important data points would lead to an accurate measurement of our program design, effectiveness of deployment and overall impact across the organization.
The obvious goal of increased job satisfaction and thus reduced turnover was too broad of a starting point. It was important to get granular for a wellness initiative which resulted in landing on facility data specific to beneficiary healthcare spend. We settled on musculoskeletal related employee health costs and ranked facilities for highest spend per beneficiary to get our target facility improvement group. These facilities will be benchmarked against historical musculoskeletal claims data for targeted improvement for the next 6-12 months.
After a root cause analysis and brainstorming session, Tara Roberts, Vice President of Quality, developed a wellness program concept that could be easily adopted by each facility in the improvement group. The program will be adopted in pieces or the whole and focuses on “day of the week wellness activities”. It also builds on the strengths of staff at the facility level who may have strong interests in one or all of the activity options.
The wellness program consists of these catchy concepts:
Meditation Mondays-facilities will create spaces indoor and/or outdoors and create time for staff to prioritize the practice of meditation, self-reflection, and learn techniques to help with lowering the heart rate, center oneself and reduce anxiety;
TED Talk Tuesdays-facilities will identify relevant wellness and health related topics deployed in various ways via group huddles, in-services, conspicuously placed poster presentations or video montages with content presented by their peers;
Walk It Out Wednesdays-facilities will encourage staff to walk during breaks or lunches and may develop friendly “step count” competitions that can also be participated in across all project facilities through our Facebook Community page;
Thera-band Thursdays-facilities will place or assign resistance bands all over facility for quick access and have scheduled points throughout the day possibly with some fun music to encourage staff and even residents to “break out” into exercise;
Flexibility Fridays-facilities will create “stretch corners” and/or provide posters and graphics on how to stretch important muscle groups affected by the type of care giving they encounter as a result of their job.
For deployment and cycles of improvement, Nexion Health will leverage its relationship with our rehab partner, Reliant Rehabilitation, to identify early adopters in our rehab departments to help drive interest as well as Nexion will identify its own staff who can champion efforts at the facility level.
To ensure maximum program penetration and peer to peer engagement, Nexion Health has created an internal Facebook Community page designed to create excitement for wellness, a culture of prioritization of well-being and a safe space for sharing struggles and accomplishments. Our targeted wellness project facility staff will be invited to voluntarily join this private group. Key members of our committee and organizational leadership will also be members to help ensure the space remains effective and leads to the best possible compliment to our desired outcomes.
As with any improvement project, Nexion Health will create opportunities for feedback loops using our Facebook Community group and via our partner VoiceFriend to deploy and receive information specifically and succinctly throughout the project. Scheduled cycles of improvement over the initial measurement period of 3-6 months will ensure we accomplish a robust wellness program offering. Our hope is to realize early success with stakeholder satisfaction of the program and plan to deploy company-wide before the end of the year.
Nexion Health is excited to prioritize and deliver on wellness for our stakeholders through this important project. Make no mistake calling this a health and wellness fad. We are committed to adopting a fundamental approach to wellness.
Tara Roberts is the Senior Vice President of Quality, Rehab and Wound Care Services for Nexion Health Management, Inc.