Vanderbilt Nursing has relaunched its Nurse Wellness website, a one-stop location for well-being resources. The new site is centered around the Wellness Wheel, a concept that reimagines nurse well-being as having eight qualities: emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical, environmental, financial, occupational and social.
Visitors to the site are invited to click on the eight colorful aspects of the wheel to find wellness resources and read about how nurse role models exemplify well-being.
“We’re holistically looking at wellness across the continuum,” said Susan Smith, DNP, RN, NPD-BC, co-chair of the Nurse Wellness Committee. “Everything from social wellness to spiritual to physical to financial, we have resources within each one that have been vetted and evidence based, internal and external.”
Though nurses are the focus, everyone in the VUMC community is invited to use the new site, which includes information about workplace violence prevention and leader support.
“As nurses and a committee, we are working to ensure that staff have wellness resources easily accessible to them,” said Sarrah Spohnholtz, MSN, RN, director of Nurse Safety and Well-being. “We also want to destigmatize using these resources. Not everyone may be comfortable reaching out to the Employee Assistance Program (EAP); they may not believe they qualify for free weekly vegetables from community-supported agriculture (CSA). Maybe they’re embarrassed to use the emergency fund offered for staff or Health Plus lifestyle coaching, etc. We hope that by highlighting other nurses and staff who have used these resources we can destigmatize their use, so nurses and health care staff get the help they deserve.”
One feature of the website is a well-being toolbox, which offers information about the Health Plus Wellness Champions (formerly Wellness Commodores), who are volunteer wellness leaders at the unit level. Additional resources address physical fitness, nutrition, emotional/spiritual and mental health resources, among other prongs of the wellness wheel.
“We want to have a one-stop shop for people, because finding resources can be challenging in itself,” said Smith, who is also director of Clinical Education & Professional Development for Vanderbilt Health Regional Hospitals & Clinics.
The Nurse Wellness Committee meets monthly, and nurses are invited to get involved or provide feedback. “Whether it’s focusing on our maturing workforce or how we build social connections throughout the Medical Center, we are trying to better communicate this important information,” said Ryan Hamman, MBA, RN, NE-BC, co-chair of the Nurse Wellness Committee.
Smith said the committee is striving to anticipate nurses’ wellness needs, rather than addressing them when they become an issue. “How do we help you in advance?” she said.
The new Nurse Wellness site strives to offer information that nurses, particularly new hires, may not know about, such as tuition reimbursement programs and the nursing student loan repayment benefit. The ultimate goal is to allow nurses to show up fully for themselves, the people they love, and their patients and families.
“One of the big challenges with nursing is we’re givers, and sometimes we don’t take time to care for ourselves because we want to take care of everyone else,” said Hamman, who is also manager of the Pediatric Float Pool at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. “We need to fill our cup as well.”
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