Hospital system’s wellness programming invests in staff resilience

Collage of group of professional doctor nurse people over isolated background relax and smiling with eyes closed doing meditation gesture with fingers. Yoga concept.

At one of the largest municipal hospital systems in the country, NYC Health + Hospitals, the “Helping Healers Heal” (H3 program for short) became a foundational infrastructure for delivering enhanced wellness programming across all service lines. Dr. Eric Wei, chief quality officer, brought this well-being approach to NYC Health + Hospitals when he started in 2018, and it has been championed by Chief Wellness Officer Jeremy Segall.

The goal of the H3 program is to provide staff across the system the opportunity to discuss difficult and rarely mentioned experiences employees face daily, especially continual  trauma faced due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The program remains committed to being proactive and has evolved over the past two years under Dr. Wei’s leadership and collaborative efforts across the system into more holistic wellness programming that addresses the emotional and psychological needs of the staff.

H3’s goal became providing on-going mental and emotional, physical, social and spiritual wellness support. To achieve that, the program is structure in three tiers: Tier One establishes a culture of support and understanding; Tier Two centers on championing and facilitating the program; and Tier Three provides a referral network for more specialized behavioral health resources.

Between March and October last year, H3 offered more than 3,930 wellness debriefs and events and conducted 15,410 wellness rounds. Wellness rooms were utilized by approximately 67,600 staff members across the system. Efforts by a philanthropic committee within NYC Health + Hospitals provided 256,313 targeted meals to hard-impacted areas of COVID to provide staff relief and also coordinated over 1 million meals from in-kind donations to all hospital and post-acute staff. 

Ragan’s Workplace Wellness Awards are open for submissions through Dec. 3, 2021. Be recognized for wellness—apply today!

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