Wellbeing & Mental Health

A choir for nurses, art tours for clinicians, on-demand meditation for all healthcare workers. In this episode, we’re sharing a panel discussion recorded live at Aspen Ideas: Health, hosted by Jon LaPook, MD and featuring Winnie Mele, RN, David Ko, and Eric Wei, MD, to learn how clinical settings are testing support and wellness interventions to boost emotional health and tame the widespread stress and burnout among nurses, physicians and all healthcare providers that intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to strain so many. Clinical staff are reporting remarkable improvements in morale and motivation from these creative approaches. Effective patient care is best delivered by a compassionate care team, and that means designing programs to heal the healers.

The nurse-led team from Vancouver Coastal Health received $150,000 in grant funding to bring their AI charting solution entitled “Autochart” to life at the 2023 NurseHack4Health Pitch-A-Thon! Find out what’s next for the AutoChart team as they take their idea for catalyzing a healthy environment where nurses and patients thrive to the next level.

The pandemic unleashed an unprecedented era of innovation in new care delivery solutions– with nurses at the center. But do those solutions work to drive change and better support nurses and the patients they care for? That’s what the five nurse-led teams around the country are exploring through a pilot program from the Institute for Health Improvement and the Johnson & Johnson Center for Health Worker Innovation. Through rapid cycle testing, nurses are examining acute care delivery solutions that attract, support, and strengthen a thriving nurse workforce.

Interprofessional collaboration is the practice of approaching patient care from a team-based perspective, with a team comprised of multiple health workers with varying professional backgrounds. By implementing interprofessional collaboration into healthcare environments, multiple disciplines can work more effectively as a team to help improve patient outcomes and better the workplace.

In this episode, recorded live at Aspen Ideas: Health, an expert panel led by nurse economist Shawna Butler, RN, MBA, vividly describes how many of our health workplaces and practices are exhausting, overly burdensome, and causing moral distress and early career departures of our talented, dedicated, and overworked healthcare professionals.

NurseHack4Health is back this fall with a new Hackathon event! To get inspired, meet two of the first-ever NurseHack4Health Pitch-A-Thon awardees who are bringing their solutions to life, and find out how your solution could be next!

As the temperatures rise and vacations are afoot, there's no better time to indulge in uninterrupted hours of podcast listening. And to make your listening easy, enjoyable, and thoughtful we’ve created a Summer SEE YOU NOW Playlist!

Johnson & Johnson was a proud presenting sponsor at Aspen Ideas: Health. In “Be Advised: Addressing Health Workforce Moral Distress,” a panel of nursing and healthcare experts confronted the challenges and highlighted the path forward to solve the healthcare worker shortage and ensure safe, quality healthcare for everyone.

In this episode, we learn from nurse Ashley Sharma, RN and physician Tim Mercer, MD, MPH, of the Mobile Medical and Mental Health (M3) Team in Austin, Texas about their high-touch approach to caring for people facing the triple threat of chronic homelessness, medical and mental health conditions, and how – in the face of clinicians wearing down from navigating fragmented health systems and departing the workforce – this collaborative, integrated care approach strengthens a sense of purpose and impact for clinicians.

For nurses, more flexibility and better work/life balance are essential. Solutions like Mercy Works on Demand are meeting nurses where they are by offering a gig-based approach to scheduling. Not only is Mercy’s innovative approach addressing shortages and improving patient care, it is also bringing joy back to nursing and demonstrating that a new, flexible future is possible for the profession.

Building well-being and leadership skills in nursing isn’t a new concept, but surprisingly, it hasn’t traditionally been a formal component of nursing education. As a result, many nurses enter the profession unprepared for what’s ahead. Beginning this winter, a new educational curriculum from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing will pilot a competency-based approach to developing the next generation of nurses at 10 nursing colleges nationwide, focused on empowering students with the skills needed to prioritize self-care, healthy behaviors and well-being in the healthcare work environment.

In Part II in our series on the power of song for health and healing, musician Darden Smith describes his observations and process of collaborative songwriting, in which he brings his knowledge of the craft to the stories and experiences of people from all walks of life to co-create songs that heal.

In this moving and art-filled two-part episode, author and science-of-arts expert Susan Magsamen and singer/songwriter Darden Smith share the research and evidence and their experience of how art changes our bodies, brains, hearts, and behaviors for the better.

Nurse-led, multidisciplinary health system teams took center stage to pitch their solutions for redesigning a healthcare workplace where nurses and other health care professionals can thrive. Meet the 2022 NurseHack4Health Pitch-A-Thon awardees.

A former bedside nurse, USCF Health's Pat Patton’s data-backed, listen-first, feedback-driven approach to creating a supportive environment where nurses stay and thrive is working—and presents a blueprint for health systems everywhere.

How do you scale sexual and gender-affirming care for LGBTQIA+ patients? Ask nursing students. This Pride Month, Johnson & Johnson is proud to recognize the Eidos LGBT+ Health Initiative, a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to improve gender and sexual health equity.

Samantha Roecker, RN has a “track record” (pun intended) of breaking many barriers and stereotypes and her success in competitive running combined with her experience as a nurse drove her to combine her passions to raise awareness and drive change for nurses. In this episode, we talk with Samantha about the impact stigma has on nurses’ ability to reach their full potential, what really defines a nurse, the power of mental health support, and the surprising overlap between nursing and competitive running.

In this episode, we learn how a health system’s leadership demonstrates their commitment to the wellbeing and flourishing of their team members; the rather unlikely story of nurses, singing, and stardom; and the surprising healing power of the arts. Special thanks to nurse and tenor singer Winnie Mele, RN, BSN, NE-BC, nurse and soprano singer Keshia Jaboin, RN, BSN , and Allison Lowenfeld from Northwell Health’s corporate marketing team for sharing their story, experience, and voices.

Charlene Platon’s innovative well-being app provides a safe space and a community for nurses to heal

Within minutes, the now-iconic images and video footage of critical care nurse Sandra Lindsay receiving a COVID-19 jab administered by fellow nurse Michelle Chester, DNP began circulating in media outlets around the globe and along with it a high-profile opportunity to reach others, inspire them, and build their vaccine confidence.

We checked in with school nurse Liz Pray, MSN-Ed, RN, NCSN in Washington State to learn about the role of a school nurse during a pandemic, how she is experiencing this moment, learning from and gaining strength from the support of her national school nursing community, and why school nurses are more important and essential than ever.

In this episode we meet Jennifer and Corey Feist, co-founders of the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes' Foundation, US Senator Tim Kaine, co-sponsor of the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act, and nurse and researcher Christopher Friese, a national authority on the nursing workforce and healthcare workplace safety to learn about ending the culture of fear regarding seeking mental health support within healthcare, the urgent need for healthcare organizations to build cultures that protect our healers, the importance of making sure that our workforces feels valued and supported at work, and the need to take care of each other and the vulnerabilities that we all have.

While the recent pandemic caused devastating loss of life and strained health systems, it also brought into sharp focus nurses’ pivotal role in healthcare and their enormous, and largely untapped potential to shape patient care, rethink how healthcare is organized, and where it’s delivered.

In this third of a multi-episode series centered on the Accelerating Nursing, Transforming Healthcare report, we go for a checkup on retail health clinics with Angela Patterson, the Chief Nurse Practitioner Officer at CVS MinuteClinic to learn how the teams at MinuteClinic worked with a variety of partners to deliver care throughout the pandemic to communities across the US when health systems around the country experienced high levels of disruption.