‘Connection to purpose’ key to clinician well-being, healthy workplace culture
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Fostering a shared connection to purpose and validating the importance of institutional well-being are essential to building a healthy oncology workplace culture.
That’s the core message Mila L. Felder, MD, FACEP, imparted during her keynote address at Association of Cancer Care Centers’ Annual Meeting and Cancer Center Business Summit.
“As we talk about well-being for different populations, it’s important to realize that there are human connections that apply to everyone,” Felder — who serves as enterprise vice president, well-being for all teammates at Advocate Health — told Healio. “It’s important to continue to remember what unites us, the challenges we share, the connection to purpose. We want to encourage a feeling of community and safety in the workplace, while also paying attention and staying focused on specifics.”
Well-being networks
In her presentation — titled “Championing an institutional culture of well-being in a post-pandemic oncology workforce” — Felder discussed the growth of Advocate’s well-being program, which has evolved to represent and support all of the health care system’s 150,000 employees.
Felder, an emergency medicine physician, discussed her origins both in the medical profession and as a new immigrant to the United States in 1991. Prior to entering medical school, Felder initially spent time working odd jobs and learning about the realities of living in a new country, which included interactions with the health care system.
“I gained first-hand knowledge, through family and personal experiences, of encounters with health care providers and caregivers,” Felder said. “When I graduated and began working as an emergency medicine physician at Advocate Christ Medical Center, I started seeing some consistent patterns in well-being and burnout, both in our clinicians and our teammates.”
Over the next 5 to 10 years, Felder began seeking ways to build communities and well-being networks to offer support to Advocate employees, both within the context of the workplace and outside the professional realm.
“We did some very interesting things through community building, bringing women together, and having events like physician well-being days and doctor week,” she said. “What we realized after a bit of time had passed was that, yes, you could invest time and build wonderful community and connection to purpose.”
A culture of wellness
Felder and her colleagues at Advocate aligned the organization’s well-being interventions with the Stanford Model of Professional Fulfillment, which focuses on developing a culture of wellness, promoting efficiency of practice and fostering personal resilience.
Advocate’s approach includes a peer-to-peer support program, a well-being council and targeted education and support to address acute issues in the workplace, such as drug shortages.
Felder played a short video titled “I am Human,” produced by Stanford Medicine WellMD & WellPhD. The video depicts the individual concerns and personal struggles of health care workers as they go about their everyday lives. It also conveys how these issues can compound the stresses they face in the workplace.
“Our clinicians are challenged by administrative burdens throughout the country, not just at Advocate,” she said. “It’s important to have someone dedicated to addressing that burden while, organizationally, we’re putting focus on the challenges we share through specific resources and support.”
It is important to strike a balance between providing a menu of items that encompass the needs of employees, while not overwhelming the organization with financial burden, Felder said.
“This is where I think organizations will find themselves learning from each other for a long time,” she said.
Felder and her team introduced a competitive program through which a single medical unit or group of individuals working in the same department could apply for a well-being grant.
“We set some criteria and went through a fairly rigorous process awarding money to local programs,” she said.
COVID-19: challenges and silver linings
Felder addressed how the pandemic has compounded issues surrounding well-being in the medical workplace.
“People have felt isolation much more realistically due to working remotely, and that still continues today,” she said. “In the past, you could speak with colleagues easily, because they were sitting in the room next to you. Now, we’re hearing about advanced depression and people truly struggling without support.”
Despite the challenges created by the pandemic, some positives have emerged, Felder said.
Among them is a peer support program created by Advocate based on the resilience work of Kim Miiller, PsyD, Advocate Health’s director of trauma recovery and resilience, as well as director of the Together as One peer-to-peer support program.
“That program was able to progress from 35 people we trained during our first training for peer support foundations in July 2020 to more than 2,000 people trained today,” Felder said. “We couldn’t do that if we kept traveling from site to site. So, we’re evolving as an organization to pick up the luxuries that COVID offered us, like the ability to train remotely.”
Workplace violence a ‘tremendous’ problem
Felder emphasized the importance of providing protection from and support regarding workplace violence, which she said has become a more significant problem in recent years.
“Workplace violence has truly grown throughout the country, to the point of seeing daily violence — gunshots being fired at hospitals, patients becoming agitated and other events,” she said. “There are a variety of different populations to worry about in outpatient, inpatient and home health settings. It’s a tremendous problem and one we consider to be one of our top priorities as an organization.”
Advocate’s workplace violence efforts — led by Jason Stopyra, MD, MS, associate professor of emergency medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine — aim to ensure that those exposed to workplace violence are “enveloped in care” at all times, Felder said.
Components of Advocate's Comprehensive Workplace Violence Mitigation program include educational tools such as Trauma Informed Care and Crisis Prevention Institute, technological inventions like mobile duress and metal detectors, as well as simplified and promoted reporting of workplace violence and enhanced support for the teammates impacted by an event or leaders in the impacted workplaces, Felder said.
“Our Workplace Violence Mitigation team includes multiple stakeholders across disciplines and clinical/ nonclinical settings, working together on the wraparound support platform and toolkits for local leaders,” Felder said.
These toolkits offer valuable guidance for leaders affected by workplace violence on their units, and provide information about steps to take and resources they can utilize.
Felder said she hopes her presentation will inspire clinicians and leaders to take steps to improve workplace well-being at their institutions.
“I hope everyone in the audience will in some way connect, and feel they can take one piece of this work and act on it once they leave the room,” Felder said. “If not, I hope they will just feel inspired to go and do things that elevate their own well-being because, ultimately, that is how organizational well-being is lifted.”
Reference:
- Stanford Medicine WellMD & WellPhD. I am human. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCZCiZ0K57M.
For more information:
Mila L Felder, MD, FACEP, can be reached at Advocate Medical Group, 4440 W. 95th St., Oak Lawn, IL 60453; email: mila.felder@aah.org.
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