Promoting front-line nurses' well-being remains a top priority for chief nursing officers amid workforce shortages and increasingly challenging working conditions.
Becker's recently asked three CNOs to share the single most important change their organization has made this year to improve nurse well-being. Their responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity and are listed in alphabetical order.
Marianne Hatfield, RN, DNP. Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer of Wellstar Kennestone Hospital (Marietta, Ga.). At Wellstar, we have taken a multimodal approach to improving and enhancing RN well-being as we know that it can affect their physical and mental health, joy and meaning in their work, professional satisfaction, and engagement with their job. So it's difficult to say what the one thing is that we've done that has had the most impact. We provide complimentary behavioral health services, offer every RN a free gym membership, have given them an annual pass to our state park system, provide a hospital-based concierge service to run errands for them during working hours, have worked to decrease the burden of non-nursing tasks by implementing a virtual tele-sitter program, have expanded different levels of unlicensed assistive personnel for tasks that can be delegated, are piloting virtual nursing for time-consuming assessments and documentation, as well decreasing alarm frequency through an alarm management strategy.
If I had to choose one thing from the last year, I'd focus on the work we have done to help them to feel physically and psychologically safe at work by continuing to improve our risk for violence prevention initiatives, which include strict behavioral standards for patients and visitors, an assessment tool that allows our nurses to score patients who have the potential to become violent and engage other resources, including our security officers, depending on the level of threat they present.
We have recently added personal panic buttons that we are piloting in a few of our higher risk settings that allow an RN or other support staff personnel to press a button worn on their lapel if they believe they are in danger. Security is silently notified of their location and can immediately respond.
Keri Noeske, RN, DNP. Chief Nursing Officer of Kaweah Health (Visalia, Calif.): The work on priority focus for well-being continues. While healthcare struggles to stabilize, we need to be ahead of the overall well-being of our team members. Care for the caregivers.
We have emphasized promoting life outside of the work shift. Our teams have scheduled activities that are educational, recreational and relationship building away from the day-to-day operations. We have activities like hiking groups, lunch and learns, team picnics, a hospitalwide carnival event that engages the teams in having game booths to offer fun activities to their peers. We continue to work to find joy and fulfillment in the relationships we have with the people we work side-by-side with every day. We will also continue to work on more well-being and relationship strengthening in the years to come.
Janice Walker, DHA, BSN, RN. Chief Nursing Executive of Baylor Scott & White Health (Dallas). Our No. 1 focus has been to get our vacancy numbers down to pre-pandemic levels. We believe this creates the right balance of well-being for our nurses. We have worked very hard to bring best practices around candidate-centric models, and strong retention practices are in place as governed by Magnet and Pathways to Excellence through the ANCC.
At Baylor Scott & White Health, all organizations are Magnet or Pathways to Excellence accredited. This builds the infrastructure for strong retention, which includes environments that are very collaborative and therapeutic so our nurses can inspirationally answer the "call of the nursing profession" every day.