Protecting the Workforce

March 2024 marks two years since President Biden signed into law the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act. This landmark, first-of-its-kind legislation has funded more than $100 million in grants to implement strategies to reduce and prevent burnout, stress and suicide, sustain well-being, and build workplace cultures and practices so our healthcare workforce can thrive!

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.

We’re swapping episodes with our friends at Radio Advisory to hear what they’re learning that can help address pressing workforce issues in healthcare, while Radio Advisory listeners are checking out an episode of SEE YOU NOW. In this Radio Advisory episode, host Rachel (Rae) Woods speaks with Advisory Board's Chief Nursing Officer, Carol Boston, and two leaders from University Hospitals – Chief Quality & Clinical Transformation Officer, Peter Pronovost, and Chief Nursing Executive, Michelle Hereford – about recent data and their experiences navigating the complexity of the workforce vacancies.

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.

In this conversation, hear from nurse Gretchen Berlin, RN, and McKinsey's Thomas London, MBA, Robin Roark, MD, MBA, and Senthu Arumugam, MBA, about the findings from a McKinsey survey to explore why nurses are considering leaving their roles, what energizes them to keep going, and how nurses around the world are eager to innovate and deliver care in different and better ways to solve what has become a consequential global problem.

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.

In this episode we meet nurses Gaurdia Banister, PhD, RN and Hiyam Nadel, MBA, CCG RN who are building a culture of inquiry for a health system globally recognized for innovation. We learn how innovation serves as an essential tool for listening and learning from the frontline and caring for the staff’s wellbeing and career fulfillment, and how problem-solving can be transformative for an entire institution.

In this lively panel discussion at the Aspen Ideas: Health conference, led by physician and former NYC Health commissioner Dave Chokshi, MD, seasoned clinicians Sandra Lindsay, RN, MBA, Adrian Billings, MD and Siobhan Wescott, MD MPH speak candidly about the exhaustion, debt, and moral injury plaguing the healthcare workforce; the political, financial, and workforce solutions they advocate for; and in spite of—or because of—the numerous system-level challenges, why working in healthcare remains a rewarding and promising career choice.

The well-being of our healthcare workforce -- specifically nurses -- took center stage at Aspen as a global priority. In an expert panel discussion led by SEE YOU NOW host and nurse Shawna Butler, we talk candidly about "Healthcare in Critical Condition: Who Cares When Nurses Leave?"

In this episode, we hear the musings of nurses Leslie Oleck, president of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association (APNA), Linda Groah, the CEO/Executive Director of the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN), and April Kapu, president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners (AANP) about the unique value their specialties bring to the healthcare system as a whole.

International Nurses Day is an important opportunity to check the pulse of nurses around the world, especially in 2022. Nurses have given their all in the response to pandemics, natural disasters, and in war zones, in leading mass COVID-19 testing and vaccination efforts, and in completely redesigning how and where care is delivered. The value of nurses has never been more clear. Nor could it be any clearer that not enough is being done to protect nurses and other health workers, tragically underscored by the more than 180,000 health worker deaths due to COVID-19 and the alarming increase of mental health conditions and concerns nurses report.

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.

Vaccines and vaccination—they’ve become one of the hottest topics of public discourse. Indeed, the Oxford Languages 2021 Word of the Year is Vax. As their pun-filled news release notes, "more than any other word, 'vax' has injected itself into the bloodstream of the English language in 2021.” With regulatory approval of a COVID vaccine for kids ages 5-11, COVID boosters for adults 65 and older and those at a higher risk for COVID, and the World Health Organization recommending widespread use of a long-awaited malaria vaccine for children, there is much vaccine progress and science to celebrate and understand.

Why is it then that nurses are often not screened or provided with mental health support in their workspaces? Nurse scientist Judy Davidson DNP, RN, FCCM, FAAN works to reinforce the mental health needs of nurses while bringing awareness to nurse suicides. She creates programs that provide simple and accessible tools for health systems to adopt throughout their networks to ensure that nurses can stay strong, be supported, and get help when needed.

As the world responds to COVID-19, increasingly and alarmingly the daily headlines include the risks our healthcare teams and essential services personnel confront in efforts to care for patients and keep our communities safe. Behind these headlines are stories of daily experiences and individual lives. Nurse Jennifer Gil shares her diary about being on the frontlines of COVID-19, about contracting the virus and being isolated from loved ones in a time of immense uncertainty. It’s a powerful reminder that we cannot lose focus on the emotional impact of this illness.

As an emergency nurse and palliative care liaison, Jonathan Bartels, RN, understands the toll that witnessing a death can have on healthcare worker resiliency. In this episode, Shawna Butler talks with Bartels on designing “The Pause,” a meaningful and effective practice that health systems are rapidly adopting to address the alarming rate of clinician burnout and mental stress.