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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.
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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