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Hospitals see the need to offer its employees programs to help develop healthy habits, but sticking with it can be difficult.

When her hospital built a gym on the floor above her office, Susan Finch found she had no more excuses not to exercise. "That's what finally got me in a gym," said the former chief nursing officer and now house supervisor at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, N.M. "When they put it over my head, I said, 'What more do I need?' "

Directors of hospital wellness programs say they are trying their best to reduce the excuses. They offer yoga and exercise classes to match all shifts. They set up weight reduction programs, hold health fairs, teach stress management sessions. They offer discounts for gym memberships or set up fitness centers within the hospital. They develop disease management programs and offer free health assessments.

At least one hospital gives employees a certain amount of money each year to spend on active lifestyle improvement.

But for many nurses-caught up in the rigors of 12-hour shifts, skipped breaks and lunch hours, exhausting workloads and family demands-even a gym over their heads or a 7:30 a.m. yoga class is not enough to get them to take care of themselves the way they should. Of all hospital employees-clerks, therapists, pharmacists, maintenance workers-nurses are the hardest group to get into hospital employee wellness programs, say program directors, many of them nurses themselves.

Nurses who do participate say the wellness programs are a huge benefit that helps them develop the healthy habits they constantly educate their patients about, but often have little time to practice themselves. They credit the wellness programs with helping them make changes toward a healthier lifestyle that they otherwise wouldn't have made, and encourage their fellow nurses to find the time to take care of themselves.

Healthy, wealthy and wise

Employee-sponsored wellness programs started springing up in the mid-1980s, as large corporate employers realized that healthy employees might save money on insurance costs and work more productively. According to the Wellness Councils of America, an organization that works with employers to create healthy workplaces, the average annual health care cost per person in the United States exceeds $3,000, and lifetime costs per person are about $225,000.

As hospitals helped create preventive care and wellness programs for the community, many began to become aware of the wellness needs of their own employees.

"There's a lot of stress in our industry," said Frank Rossi, senior vice president of human resources for Cook Children's Health Care System in Fort Worth, Texas. "Both occupational and nonoccupational concerns add to the total bill of how healthy our employees are."

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